bio

A. J. BERMUDEZ is an award-winning writer and director who divides her time between Los Angeles and New York. Her first book, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, won the 2022 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a 2023 Lambda Award Finalist. Writing credits include MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE (directed by Kyle Hausmann Stokes; starring Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman), iCON (Grand Prize Winner of the PAGE Award, 2021), NIGHTINGALE (Grand Prize Winner of an International Screenwriters Association Award, 2020), and THE FACE OF THE EARTH (Grand Prize Winner of the Diverse Voices Award, 2018). Her work has been featured at the Yale Center for British Art, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the LGBTQ+ Toronto Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of literary publications, including The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Chicago Quarterly Review, Story, Hopkins Review, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction, Electric Literature, The Masters Review, Columbia Journal, The Chicago Review, Fiction International, The Offing, Gertrude Press, Hobart, Black Static, Cheap Pop, Exposition Review, Lunch Ticket, Baltimore Review, Epiphany, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.

In addition to writing and filmmaking, Bermudez is also a former boxer and EMT, and her work gravitates toward contemporary intersections of power, privilege, and place. She is a 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellow, a Writer’s Digest National Award Winner, a nominee for the Spotlight Culture & Heritage Award, a finalist for the One Story Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship, winner of the WeScreenplay Grand Prize, winner of the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, and one of the ISA’s Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch. She was recently announced as Editor of The Maine Review and serves as Artistic Director of The American Playbook. Her work has received support from the Banff Centre, the American Cultural Association of Morocco, the Montalvo Arts Foundation, the Bethany Arts Community, the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, the Montello Foundation, the Cambridge Writers Workshop, and the Watermill Center. Her first solo-written feature film premiered in 2018, and her next project will shoot in spring 2024.