**Sponsored by the UPenn Creative Writing Program **

"Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism."

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Jaquira Díaz is the author of ORDINARY GIRLS, a memoir, forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She is a 2016-18 Kenyon Review Fellow, and recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. A finalist for The Krause Essay Prize, she's been awarded fellowships or scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Summer Literary Seminars, the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her work appears in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The FADER, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Salon, Brevity, Tin House online, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and nytimes.com, among other publications. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review. ​

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO's is the author of the memoir In the Dream House (October 2019) and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.