Teresa Carmody

Teresa Carmody (she/they) writes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Their books include Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), The Reconception of Marie (2020), and A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others (2025), and Requiem, reissued in a new edition from punctum books (2025). Their writing was selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (2009) and by Entropy for its Best Online Articles and Essays list of 2019. The Reconception of Marie was also a finalist for the 2020 Big Other Fiction Award and Reader’s Choice Award. Lucy Ives selected their story “Work Friends, or the Elements of Fiction Make a Story GoGo” as Fugue’s 2024 Prose Contest Runner-Up.

A co-coordinator of the first Ladyfest Olympia, WA in 2000, she has two decades of experience organizing and curating events that create community in the arts. In 2005, she co-launched Les Figues Press, a nonprofit literary publisher of poetry and hybrid prose, with a focus on translation and works by feminist and queer writers. Her curations range from monthly reading series and Mrs. Porters Salon, to weekend or year-long projects, such as Both Sides and the Center, Not Content and Q.E.D. I & II, at venues including MAK Center Schindler House, The Smell, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and Human Resources Los Angeles. Their co-edited anthologies include I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and TrenchArt: Monographs. As director of Stetson University’s MFA program, they have organized residencies in Latin America and at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL. She currently teaches in the Writer’s Workshop at University of Nebraska, Omaha, and in UNO’s low-residency MFA program.

In her writing, Carmody explores issues of spirituality, gossip, intersubjectivity and perception, queer relations, friendship, embodiment and the archive, intersectional feminism, and autofiction/autotheory. Much of their work arises from procedure or constraint-based practices, as a way to playfully engage with social scripting and the unconscious. Drawing on her early training in feminist anthropology, global feminisms, and Thai language and culture, her fiction often takes an auto-ethnographic turn, troubling the line between fiction and non-fiction. They hold a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from the Evergreen State College, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University, and a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver.