Marisa Matarazzo is an author from Los Angeles, California. Her debut collection of interconnected short stories, Drenched, was published by Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint. She is the daughter of abstract artist Francine Matarazzo and John H. Schumann, a researcher and professor of Applied Linguistics. She earned her BA from Yale, where she received the Wallace Prize for fiction writing, and the Arthur Willis Colton Scholarship. She was a two-time recipient of the Elmore A. Willets Prize for fiction. Earning her MFA from UC Irvine, she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship.
Matarazzo's works have been published in Faultline, Hobart, Fivechapters, Unstuck as well as several other literary journals, and she has taught at UCLA Extension Writers' Program. Her work has also been performed by WordTheatre.
She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel.
“Marisa Matarazzo’s voice, fresh and strange as it sounds, is as natural as heartbeat to her characters. I love the way the voices in these accumulating stories breathe-their respirations and inspirations-oddly reassuring as this reader, alarmed by the situations and circumstances Matarazzo has created for her offspring, accepts the extraordinary as the boon it is. Like a fond parent, and just as touchingly, she is in it with her characters all the way over her head. She’s rooting them on; I want readers to root her on.”
— Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Edge of Maine
“Marisa Matarazzo combines abstractions and firm frameworks with the luscious visceral shape-shifting world of bodies and attraction-put all together, it’s like watching dyed chiffon spill out of an iron lattice.
This is a collection that marks its own territory and stamps it out with a textured beauty.”
— Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
“There’s a wonderful new wave in short stories happening: surprising, weird, uncoupled from standard realism but profoundly real about common feelings. It doesn’t have a name yet, only exemplars —- you could name George Saunders or Kelly Link, and now Marisa Matarazzo. Don’t miss her or you’ll be sorry.””
— John Crowley, author of Little, Big