Photo Credit Jasna Bogdanovska

Maria Brandt is a Sicilian- and Polish-American writer and teacher of writing with ancestral roots in Bensonhurst and Speonk. Her family history is marked by powerful sisters, lost mothers and babies, the churning waters of Long Island, and a changing relationship with Catholicism. Maria read Agatha Christie and Harlequin romances growing up, but needed to read about someone who felt more like she did: unusually curious about other people, unusually comfortable being alone. Now, also informed by decades of scholarly and activist analysis of violence and its representations, her creative work consistently holds up a light to the small ways broken people heal. In particular, she probes how intergenerational trauma is reinforced by cultural narratives that imprint upon gender and sexual identity, and her aim is to disrupt these narratives by examining the material present of scene and then excavating the more abstract shadows of history and character. Always, she is interested in the power and illusions of gender, the redemptive potential of kindness, and the surprising ways paying attention can change everything.

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Maria Brandt has published short-fiction and nonfiction in Santa Fe Quarterly, Arts & Letters, Coal Hill Review, VIDA, and Cleaver, among others. Her collection New York Plays was produced by Out of Pocket Theatre and is catalogued with Heartland Plays, her novella All the Words won the Grassic Short Novel Prize, and her full-length play Swans premiered at Geva Theatre Center’s Fielding Stage, co-produced by Method Machine and Straw Mat Writers. Currently, Maria is finishing her first short-fiction collection, developing several longer plays, and revising her first novel. She is an active member of Straw Mat Writers, Rochester Playwrights Group, Queen City Playwrights, the Dramatists Guild, the Two-Year College Caucus at AWP, and a recent alumnus of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Maria teaches Creative Writing at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York.

Email: mbrandt@monroecc.edu
Facebook: Maria Frances Brandt
Instagram: mariafrancesbrandt
X: @mbrandtmbrandt

 

Photo Credit Emily Brandt

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