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Brenda Peynado

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Assistant Professor

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Ph.D., University of Cincinnati
MFA, Florida State University


Email: bpeynado@central.uh.edu
Office: Science Building, Room 121

Biographical Summary

Brenda Peynado is an assistant professor of creative writing. She received her Ph.D. in fiction from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA in fiction from Florida State University. Her fiction and screenwriting focus on political violence, girlhood and the moral quandaries of love, while her craft and scholarship focuses on magical realism and alternative realities. Peynado’s first book, “The Rock Eaters,” is a short-story collection featuring angels, ghosts, aliens and Latina girlhood, focusing on what it means to love across boundaries of class, race, gender and immigration. Her short stories have been featured in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize and The O. Henry Prize anthologies.

After returning from a Fulbright grant to do research in the Dominican Republic, she is working on a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who tries to save her combatant mother. Having once worked in computer science and neuroscience, she is also pursuing collaborations in narrative-inspired artificial intelligence, user experiences and augmented reality. Prior to joining the University of Houston, she was an assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida.