Writers like Machado offer up their ability to communicate the inexpressible through language. It’s mental self-flagellation: the prying open of one’s life, the splitting of the past like a cracked egg, the choice to trap yourself in the mirrored halls of your own memory, the equivalent of digging a nail into an open sore. Very few works of writing are more fraught, more difficult, than a memoir. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of 'The New Vanguard,' one of '15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.'

Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Crawford Award.

The New Yorker / TIME Magazine / New York Times / NPR / Publishers Weekly / BookPage / Vulture / Autostraddle / LitHub / Vogue / Kirkus / Entertainment Weekly / Harper’s Bazaar / The Atlantic / Paris Review / Vogue / Washington Post / A.V.Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction / Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction / Finalist for the Stonewall Book Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award / Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing / Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction One of the best-reviewed nonfiction titles of 2019 Proceed directly into the forbidden room enjoy the view as the floor gives way.” -Parul Sehgal, The New York Times My debut memoir, In the Dream House, is available from Graywolf Press (US) and Strange Light (Canada), and Serpent's Tail (UK).

In the dream house carmen maria machado