User:Jblain2011

Chris Adrian

Education
Chris Adrian lived in Annapolis, Maryland until the age of 10, when he and his family moved to Miami, Florida. Later, Adrian moved to Orlando, Florida where he graduated high school. After high school, he went to the University of Florida as an undergraduate student and received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1993. After graduation from University of Florida, Adrian got his Master of Fine Arts*(MFA) from University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1995. He later received his M.D. from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 2001. He then completed his residency in pediatrics at the University of California in San Francisco and then moved on to pursue a degree in divinity at Harvard. Adrian interrupted his studies at Harvard to go back to UCSF to start his fellowship training. He then planned to finish divinity school and finally return to San Francisco to complete his fellowship training. Chris Adrian completed divinity school at Harvard and is currently a pediatric fellow in hematology and oncology.

History
Chris Adrian began writing in high school. Today, he has had many short stories published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, andZoetrope. Adrian was one of only eleven authors who received a Guggenheim Fellow ship in 2009 and he was named as one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40”. He has written many short stories and four novels including Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, A Better Angel, and The Great Night.

Works
Adrian also wrote a collection of short stories called A Better Angel. Included in this collection of short stories are High Speeds (1997), The Sum of Our Parts (1999), A Hero of Chickamauga (1999), A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death (2004), Stab (2006), A Better Angel (2006), The Vision of Peter Damien (2007), The Changeling (2007), and Why Antichrist (2007). Among Adrian’s uncollected short stories are You Can Have It (1996), Grief (1997), Every Night for a Thousand Years (1997), Horse and Horsemen (1998), The Glass House (2000), The Stepfather (2005), A Tiny Feast (2009), The Black Square (2009), and The Warm Fuzzies (2010). Chris Adrian is a lifelong fan of William Shakespeare and commonly writes about sick, injured, or near death children as well as hospitals and doctors. He also enjoys writing about history, angels, magic, and mythical beings. One of his novels, Gob’s Grief, is about he lives of Gob and Tomo Woodhull who are the twin sons of Victoria Woodhull, a nineteenth-century proto-feminist. In August, 1863, 11-year old Tomo Woodhull fights in the Civil War and is killed in the first battle. Gob then grows up in a life filled with grief and grows up studying to be a doctor in New York City. Here, Gob begins working on a machine that he plans will bring Tomo, as well as the rest of the war’s deceased, back to life. Gob continues to work on his creation and has many experiences with the other characters of the story. Publisher’s Weekly said “Much like Gob's creation, the novel is a collection of fabulous parts in need of a heart to power them, yet impressing as a flight of fancy. FYI Every Night for a Thousand Years, the New Yorker story from which this novel stemmed, was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1998.” John Freeman of Time Out, New York said, “A soulful, searching literary debut...Unlike many first time novelists, Adrian takes great risks here. He brings to life scores of historical figures, from Walt Whitman to Abe Lincoln, with a startling ease and grace. More remarkable, however, is his ability to inspire sympathy for—even faith in—Gob's mission. It is a testament to Adrian's powers as a writer that we finish this story crushed anew by the knowledge that we can never truly revive our lost ones.” All of Chris Adrian’s novels and short stories and have received a majority of good reviews. Adrian is currently living back and forth between Boston and San Francisco.