Courtney Angela Brkic

Courtney Angela Brkic (born 1972) is Croatian American memoirist, short story writer, and academic.

Early life

Angela Brkic is a native of Washington, D.C., grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and graduated from Yorktown High School. She studied archaeology at the College of William and Mary, and graduated from New York University, with an MFA.

Career

In 1996, she went to eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a Physicians for Human Rights forensic team, then worked as a summary translator for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She has taught creative writing at New York University, the Cooper Union, and Kenyon College, where she held the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing in 2006. She teaches at George Mason University, and lives in New York City with her husband, Phil.

Critical reception

In a newly published book, Stillness and Other Stories, Courtney Angela Brkic writes about lifeduring the wars that ravaged Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina beginning in 1991. This is a powerful and vivid account in sixteen short stories of theeffects of war as told by types of people who experienced it.

Every war reminds us that it is essential to have writers who have witnessed the realities and the aftermath of battle, who can help us see into the hearts and minds of soldiers and civilians, who can describe -- without excessive romance or rhetoric -- bloodshed and brutality, survival and resilience. One such writer is Courtney Angela Brkic, whose introduction to Stillness, her first volume of short stories, explains the passion and conviction she has brought to this spare and poignant book.

Awards

• 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant
• 2003 Whiting Award for Fiction and Nonfiction
• Fulbright Scholarship to research women in Croatia's war-affected population
• New York Times Fellowship.

Works

Books

• Stillness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003. ISBN 978-0-374-26999-9.
• The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2004. ISBN 978-0-374-20774-8. reprint. Picador. 2005. ISBN 978-0-312-42439-8.
• The First Rule of Swimming. Little, Brown and Company. 2013. ISBN 978-0-31621-738-5.

Translations

• A.B. Simic. Modern Poetry in Translation 18. Translator Courtney Angela Brkic. ISBN 978-0-9533824-4-6.

Short stories

• "Adiyo, Kerido". Zoetrope: All-Story. 7 (2). Summer 2003.
• "Departure". Kenyon Review. 28 (2): 4–10. Spring 2006.
• "the offering". North American Review. 290 (6): 30–33. Dec 2006.
• "Gathering Up the Gods". Missouri Review. 29 (4): 42–57. Winter 2006.

Essays

• "Smoldering". Washington Post Magazine: W21. 16 January 2005.

External links

• "Author's website"
• "Courtney Angela Brkic: Author of Stone Fields converses with Robert Birnbaum", identity theory, May 24, 2005
• "The Stone Fields by Courtney Angela Brkic", Bookslut, October 2004
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation