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

area of specialty

Creative writing/fiction