Writers Series: Carmen Maria Machado

The Salem State Writers  Series invites noted authors of short stories, biography, poetry, poetry, memoir and essays to share their work at free readings throughout the academic year. The 2024-2025 Series opens with a reading by Carmen Maria Machado, short story author, essayist, and critic. Admission to this event is free. 

Carmen Maria Machado’s writing defies and blends genres such as surrealism,

fantasy, and horror to create writing that is so palpable it seems alive. Her work has been compared to that of Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link and Angela Carter, but with a voice that is uniquely her own.

Growing up in a household where storytelling was always present, Carmen has been

writing her whole life. She learned about stories through reading, as well as oral tradition in her family. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo,

Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Carmen is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel

The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. 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.”

Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s

Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy,

Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. Carmen lives in Iowa City.