Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, OKSANA, BEHAVE! was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in 2019 and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick as well as a best spring read according to Oprah Magazine, InStyle, Pop Sugar, and The Wall Street Journal. Her second novel, SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLE, was published by Random House in April 2021 and was praised in the New York Times and called a best spring read according to PureWow, AV Club, Paperback Paris, Alma, and Bustle.

Her latest book, HOT TRAUMA TIME MACHINE, is a motherhood multiverse story collection consisting of humorous speculative tales about a troubled mother-artist named Yulia whose brooding experimental scientist father tries to help her deal with physical, emotional, and existential ailments with tragic and hilarious results. You can read excerpts in over a dozen literary journals, including The Sun, Threepenny Review, The Rumpus, and The Yale Review, and One Story. One of the stories, “Floating Around,” won a 2026 Pushcart Prize.

Maria is also known for writing “The Publishing Industry Gambled on Me…And Lost” for LitHub, an essay which was considered one of “LitHub’s Favorite Stories of 2025,” out of the 2,500 stories they published that year. She describes her experiences after the books she sold to a Big Five publisher underperformed, leading her to feel like she was punished for her “bad track” record when she tried to sell another Oksana novel, though she is confident she is writing at the top of her game. This novel chronicled Maria’s hellish experiences with postpartum insomnia, which she wrote about for Slate magazine. You can’t read another Oksana novel for now, but she is always publishing more Oksana stories, which you can read in journals including Joyland, Guernica, and The Georgia Review.

She lives in Auburn, Alabama with her husband and two children, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University. She is a recent recipient of a 2027 Alabama Council of the Arts grant. She is also the Fiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review.

Follow Maria on Instagram @mashawritesstuff.