Brenda Peynado

Brenda Peynado’s novella, Time’s Agent, about a disgraced archeologist taking on one last mission into a time-dilated pocket world to redeem herself to her wife, her daughter’s consciousness inside a robot dog, and history, is forthcoming from Tor.com in 2024. Peynado’s genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters — featuring Latina girlhood, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones — garnered starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature’s best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. More than forty other short stories have appeared in places such as Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, and Lightspeed. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.