Carmen Maria Machado

Fall 2022 Writer-In-Residence

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, and the DC Comics series The Low, Low Woods (in collaboration with illustrator Dani Strips). A prolific and fearless writer who adds grace, humor and gravity to every story she tells, Machado has carved out a place for herself in popular culture; Florence + The Machine cited her work as a crucial influence on their critically and commercially successful album Dance Fever.

Nominated for the National Book Award, she has also won several awards for her writing such as the 2021 Rathbones Folio prize, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, 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.”

Reflecting on Machado’s Reading & Conversation – October 20th, 2022

The Harman Program held our Fall 2022 Reading & Conversation event with Writer-In-Residence Carmen Maria Machado. After an introduction by Prof. Debra Caplan of Baruch’s FPA Department, Machado read her recently published short story “The Tour”, which offered a sneak peak into her next book project. Profs. Rojo Robles and Salois of the podcast Latinx Visions interviewed Machado following her reading, discussing her stylistic choices, her inspirations and her identity as a queer Latinx writer. Central to the conversation was the importance of horror and suspense to Machado’s writing. She said:

It’s a genre that offers so much, brings me as a viewer and writer face to face with my own fear, the things that really cut me to the quick. It best encapsulates my project: the horror of being alive, the horror of having a body, the horror of being a woman, of just being in the world in various iterations.

A recording of the event has been released on Latinx Visions as an episode, entitled “Queer Latinidades and Literature – Interview with Carmen Maria Machado”. It can be accessed here.