Carmen Machado holds a BA in visual media from American University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Machado is the author of four books: the award-winning short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017), the bestselling experimental memoir In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019), the graphic novel The Law, Low Woods (DC Comics, 2021), and the forthcoming linked story collection A Brief and Fearful Star (Knopf, 2027). Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Granta, Vogue, “This American Life,” Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, Shirley Jackson Award, National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. Machado has held fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She was also an Abrams Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and currently a visiting associate professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
At the Academy, Machado is working on her debut novel, “Holy Shiver.” Set in the present and near future and told from multiple third-person perspectives, the novel follows a group of lesbians navigating sex, desire, and obsession as their pandemic-stricken homeland slides into fascism. The novel’s protagonists are in search of something powerful but ineffable, trying to find purpose in their longing amidst homophobia, cultural decline, and political danger. Drawing inspiration from German medieval mysticism (Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg), “Holy Shiver” explores embodiment and erotic mysticism, power and consent, and the concept of recursion. During her residency, Machado plans to visit several sacred sites, including the Helfta Monastery in Eisleben, and to speak with German ethologists and literary scholars about the holy shiver (“heilige Schauer”), a concept developed in German poetry and popularized by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz.
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Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
David Abraham
