MAINE LIT FEST EVENT - DAY 1
Please join us in person or via livestream for the Maine Lit Fest Kickoff Event, a FREE conversation between author Carmen Maria Machado and Colby Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and novelist, Sarah Braunstein (author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children).
One of today's most ground-breaking young writers, Carmen Maria Machado creates haunting and genre-defying work that blends sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and literary criticism and grips readers from beginning to end. For this Kickoff Event, Machado, best known for her memoir In the Dream House and her award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, will discuss breaking literary molds, writing queer relationships, embracing the weird, and her writing process and projects.
To register to attend this FREE event, please click the button above. For this event, there is also a Custom Coach bus from Portland to Waterville on which you can reserve a seat for $10.
Doors open at 6:30 PM, and the conversation starts at 7 PM. We suggest coming early to get a seat in the auditorium. Registering for the event will secure you a spot, but you may be directed to the overflow room once the auditorium reaches capacity.
Masks are required.
You can livestream this event HERE.
Books will be sold by The Colby Bookstore.
Carmen Maria Machado’s writing defies and blends genres such as surrealism, fantasy, and horror to create writing that is so palpable it seems alive. Her work has been compared to that of Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link and Angela Carter, but with a voice that is uniquely her own.
Growing up in a household where storytelling was always present, Carmen has been writing her whole life. She learned about stories through reading, as well as oral tradition in her family. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Her spellbinding debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was longlisted for the National Book Award before it was even published. It was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and it was the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. 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 memoir, In the Dream House, was Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, was the #1 Indie Next Pick for November 2019, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. Of Carmen and her memoir, the New York Times writes, “Welcome to the House of Machado. Proceed directly into the forbidden room; enjoy the view as the floor gives way.”
Carmen is an immense fan of the horror genre and has a special place in her heart for Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Set in Shudder-To-Think, PA, Carmen’s newest project is a limited-run comics series called The Low, Low Woods, out from DC Comics, which takes body horror down paths heretofore unexplored in comics.
Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W. W. Norton), winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Fiction. The novel was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick of the Month. Bitch magazine said it's a novel "akin to the film Magnolia (if Saul Bellow had written the novelization)."
Sarah’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and in other publications. She co-wrote a play, String Theory: Three Greek Myths Woven Together, with Michael Barakiva and Amy Boyce Holtcamp.
Sarah has been the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. For several years she served on the National Selection Panel of the National YoungArts Foundation.
Sarah holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College.