Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She received an MFA in Creative Writing 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.

She has recently completed SEARCHING FOR MARINA LUZER, a “neurotic thriller” about an anxious and spirited high school student named Marina Luzer whose best friend disappears after becoming obsessed with her long-ago missing aunt, leading Marina on a wild journey back to her homeland of Ukraine to find out what really happened to the two missing women whose lives have taken over her own.

Additionally, she has completed EVERY LITTLE ACHE I FEEL IS TRAGIC, a motherhood multiverse novel-in-stories 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 from this novel in over a dozen literary journals, including The Sun, Threepenny Review, The Rumpus, and The Yale Review, and another excerpt is forthcoming in One Story. One of the stories, “Floating Around,” has recently won a Pushcart Prize and will be published in the 2026 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Mostly, though, Maria is 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. The essay describes her challenges in selling her postpartum follow-up to Oksana, Behave! after the books from her two-book deal at a Big Five publishing house underperformed, making her unappealing to editors in spite of the fact that she is certain her newer work is so much better than her early work. Because writing a follow-up to a follow-up that did not sell seemed like an inspired idea to Maria, she also wrote Will Someone Please Publish Oksana? - a third (!) Oksana novel which pokes fun at the themes in her popular LitHub essay and rifs more on the postpartum experience. The first three chapters have been published or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Guernica, and The Georgia Review. You can read the second chapter in Guernica here.

She lives in Auburn, Alabama with her husband and two children, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University. She is also the Fiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review. She believes that she will find an editor to champion her work and is confident that she is writing at the top of her game.

Follow Maria on Instagram @mashawritesstuff.