She also did freelance writing while she lived in Pennsylvania.

After a rejection from Starbucks in 2013, she took up work at Lush, a soap store, while she taught writing as an adjunct professor at Rosemont College and other schools in the area. Machado worked in the Iowa Writers' Workshop for two years after receiving her MFA there. Machado also attended the Clarion Workshop, where she studied under author Ted Chiang and others. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the University of Iowa, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She attended Parkland High School in South Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania and then American University in Washington, D.C., graduating in 2008. Machado grew up in a very religious United Methodist household this upbringing, she says, led to a sense of guilt about her queer sexuality for several years. He worked in the United States Patent Office and met his future wife when she immigrated to the U.S. citizenship after serving in the Korean War. Machado's paternal grandfather left Santa Clara, Cuba for the United States when he was 18, gaining U.S. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.Ĭarmen Maria Machado was born Jin Allentown, Pennsylvania. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Carmen Maria Machado (born July 3, 1986) is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize.

The low low woods