CONWAY, Ark. (September 19, 2024) — Murphy Visiting Writer Carmen Maria Machado will read and discuss her work on Wednesday, October 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall at Hendrix College. A reception and book signing in Trieschmann Gallery will follow the reading, and WordsWorth Books of Little Rock will sell Machado’s work. This event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are required.
Machado 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.
Machado’s writing defies and blends genres such as surrealism, fantasy, and horror, and it is this freedom with genre that creates an examination of the psychological effects of domestic violence, sexism, loneliness, and trauma throughout her work. Her writing has been compared to that of Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link, and Angela Carter, but Machado has a voice that is uniquely her own.
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, poetry, 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. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.