Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and her fiction appears in The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, The Bennington Review, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere, while her essays can be found in Slate, Guernica, and Catapult, among others.

Her debut novel, OKSANA, BEHAVE! was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in March of 2019, and her second novel, SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLE, will be published by Random House in April 2021. Excerpts from the novel appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review Online, Mississippi Review, and The Southern Review.

She lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and daughter, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.