Both events will take place on Thursday, Oct. 19, with one reading hosted at the DMACC Ankeny Campus and a second reading held at Beaverdale Books in Des Moines
Now in its 21st year, the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts will host a variety of prominent authors for monthly reading events throughout the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters.
All DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts events are free and open to the public.
Award-winning author Carmen Maria Machado will kick things off this fall as the Celebration’s featured author for the month of October 2023.
The DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts is pleased to announce award-winning author Carmen Maria Machado as its first featured writer of the fall 2023 semester. Machado will participate in two free, in-person readings on Thur., Oct. 19, as part of the Celebration.
Now in its 21st year, the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts spotlights a variety of local, regional and nationally known authors on a regular basis throughout the year. All events are free and open to the public.
The events with Machado will be held as follows:
“We’re excited to welcome a dynamic and diverse line-up of authors to the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts this year, beginning with two free events featuring National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado,” said Marc Dickinson, DMACC English Professor and Coordinator of the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts. “I would encourage everyone to join us; you’ll leave inspired!”
About the author: Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir “In the Dream House,” the graphic novel “The Low, Low Woods,” and the award-winning short story collection “Her Body and Other Parties.” She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, 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 essays, fiction and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
For more information about the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts, visit cla.dmacc.edu or contact Marc Dickinson, DMACC English Professor and Coordinator of the DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts, at (515) 964-6221 or madickinson@dmacc.edu.
Select writings by Carmen Maria Machado: