Brenda Peynado

Brenda Peynado is a Dominican American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her writing style ranges from lyric essays, magical realism, fabulism, science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, to some perfectly realistic exaggerations thrown in the mix.

Her short story collection, "The Rock Eaters", is forthcoming from Penguin Books in March 2021. Her work appears in 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.

After a BA in Computer Science from Wellesley College, she worked as an IT auditor for IBM. She graduated with her MFA in fiction from Florida State University, where she held a Kingsbury Fellowship and was Fiction Editor of The Southeast Review. In 2014, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to the Dominican Republic to write a novel about the 1965 Guerra de Abril. She received her Ph.D. in fiction from the University of Cincinnati, where she taught screenwriting, fiction, and science fiction & fantasy writing.

Currently, she teaches fiction and screenwriting at the University of Central Florida’s BA and MFA programs.