Courtney Angela Brkic

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

Early life
Brkic is a native of Washington, D.C. who grew up in Arlington, Virginia and graduated from Yorktown High School. She graduated from the College of William & Mary with a major in anthropology and a minor in Hispanic Studies. Before earning her MFA from New York University, Brkic lived in Bosnia, Croatia, and the Netherlands.

Career
In 1996, at the age of 23, she went to eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a Physicians for Human Rights forensic team. She spent a month helping to exhume and identify the bodies of thousands of men and boys who were massacred by Serb forces the year before. She went on to work 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.

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.