Brenda Peynado
Assistant Professor
CONTACT
Email
Office: CPR 334
bio
Brenda Peynado is a Dominican American writer of short stories, novels, nonfiction,
and screenplays. She often writes about Latina girlhood, class, race, and commodity
culture through literary realism, magical realism and near-future science fiction.
She has taught classes on screenwriting, novel writing, short story writing, and science
fiction and fantasy writing. Additionally, her scholarship focuses on the craft of
writing the unreal.
Over forty of her short stories appear in journals such as Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, Threepenny Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her stories have won a Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize; inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best Small Fiction, and Best Microfiction anthologies, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, and other awards.
Her genre-bending short story collection, THE ROCK EATERS—featuring Latina girlhood
in Florida, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows
manifesting as tumorous stones— was published by Penguin books in 2021. It garnered
starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews and was listed as one of NPR’s and the New York Public Libraries’ best books of 2021. Of it, NPR has said “…stirs
the soul with justice and rage…The author wields a righteous voice that's as frank
as it is dreamlike.” And Boston Globe has said, “Genre-bending brilliance…Peynado’s
harnessing of the diasporic imagination establishes her as a true magician of the
marvelous real.”
Her second book, Time’s Agent, is a multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, robots, and the Dominican Republic,
published by Tordotcom/Macmillan in August of 2024. About a disgraced time researcher
who goes on one last mission to redeem herself, her world, and her family, it’s been
listed as one of Lithub’s and Amazon Editors’ Pick best science fiction and fantasy
books in August 2024. Lauren Groff has said of it, “I was astonished by how many huge
ideas could fit into this taut, swift novella by Brenda Peynado: it’s all at once
a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature
of memory and time; yet the book is miraculously also buoyant, thrilling, a breathless
and headlong read for a breathtaking time on this planet. I ate it up.” Library Journal’s starred review said, “There are huge, fascinating ideas laced throughout this story
of shattering grief.”
She is currently at work on a novel abut the 1965 Guerra de Abril in the Dominican
Republic and a girl who tries to save her combatant mother across multiple timelines,
for which she received a Fulbright fellowship, as well as a craft book on writing
the unreal.
education
PhD, University of Cincinnati
MFA, Florida State University
BA, Wellesley College