Brenda Peynado

Brenda Peynado is a Dominican-American writer of fiction, nonfiction, comics 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 work appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun, Threepenny Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review online, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, a Dana Award in Fiction, the Writers at Work contest, 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.