Writers at Work: Brenda Peynado

April 9th 2026 at 6:00pm
Fourth Floor Program Room

The topic of the talk is Story Detective. Brenda Peynado will  speak about how to find the stories hiding in plain sight, using the techniques developed by video game developers. For writers, social media influencers, artists and creatives, and everyone who has ever wanted to tell a good story

Brenda Peynado's latest book, Time’s Agent, about a disgraced time agent on one last mission for redemption to save a world destroyed by capitalism and her own actions forty years previous, won the Phillip K. Dick Award and was one of Amazon Editors’ and Book Riot’s best books of August. Her genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring Latina girlhood, basement ghosts, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of 2021. 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; and other awards. She teaches fiction at the University of South Florida.