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Courtney Eldridge (born August 18, 1971) is an American novelist and short fiction writer.

Life
Courtney Eldridge grew up in a semi-nomadic fashion, living for periods in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Her latter-day hippie parents moved as employment opportunities required, introducing their only child to an unencumbered life in motion. solid constant in the geography of her childhood, however, was her grandparents' small town home in southeast Iowa, where Eldridge spent summers, surrounded by a large family of seven aunts and uncles, and a plentiful share of cousins. Rather than books and literature, the predominant childhood influences on her later work as a writer were her parents' ever-present rock music and the story telling passion of her maternal grandfather. Around the time she was 14 years old, her nuclear family settled in _______.

Eldridge attended University of Colorado at Boulder, Rhode Island School of Design, and University of Texas at Austin. having no particular predisposition for writing at that time, she moved across a spectrum of arts, studying literature, fashion design and painting, and film, at each respective school. Sensitive to an uncomfortable tension between her working class upbringing and the affluence of the prestigious art school in Providence, Eldridge became curious about the cultural stratification she saw in the art world. She was fiercely loyal, especially, to her grandfather's roots.

Her literary education began during her travels in Europe, after she had abandoned the notion of a college education. Here "she discovered the pioneering modernists––Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Robert Walser––who would shape her sensibility." Here too began the seeds of her writing, in the form of a constant flow of letters to her mother, describing in intricate detail her observations and experiences. She continued the epistles from her subsequent sojourn in Mexico with a boyfriend. Some of material of these letters found its way into her first stories.

In 1997, she moved to New York City with the intention of becoming a writer. Alphabet City, in the East Village, became her home. She began to publish stories in

Honors

 * Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc. Fellowship (2006)
 * Ucross Foundation Fellowship (2006)
 * Prix du Marais literary prize, for the novella The Former World Record Holder Settles Down (2006)