Courtney Angela Brkic (born 1972) is Croatian American memoirist, short story writer, and academic.
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She 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.
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.[1][2] She teaches at George Mason University, and lives in New York City with her husband, Phil.
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.[4]
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.[5]