Brenda Peynado is a Dominican American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. She often writes about Latina girlhood, class, race, and commodity culture through literary realism, magical realism and near-future science fiction.

Her short story collection, THE ROCK EATERS, was published by Penguin Books in March 2021, and listed as one of NPR.org, and the New York Public Libraries best books of 2021. Over forty short stories appear in journals such as 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 at the University of Houston.

Represented by Michelle Brower of Trellis Creative Management.