Catherine Brady

Background

Catherine Brady was born on the 9th of December, 1955 in the United States.

Education

Catherine Brady received a Master of Arts degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Hollins College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts.

Career

Catherine Brady is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of San Francisco. Brady's first collection “The End of the Class War”, written in 1999, draws on her Irish immigrant roots to tell stories of long-suffering, working-class women struggling to hold their families together in a new, and often hostile, land.

Her second short story collection “Curled in the Bed of Love” was written in 2003. In the award-winning title story, Brady imagines the lives of two gay men, one with HIV, who struggle with the fear of death and then with the curious dilemmas that come from the drugs that actually treat AIDS, replacing the certainty of impending death with the challenges of long-term, enervating treatment.

Other stories involve equally intimate dilemmas, such as a woman's longing for the heroin addict who got her pregnant, even though she has found love and support with another man. Other stories concern the guilt of betrayal, the struggle to overcome grief, and the pain of impotence.

Catherine Brady's most recent collections are “The Mechanics of Falling & Other Stories” published in 2009 and “Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction” in 2010. Brady is also the author of a biography of a molecular biologist, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. Her critical essays on the craft of fiction have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle.

Achievements

• An award-winning short-story writer, Catherine Brady has had her work published in numerous literary magazines such as Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Virginia Quarterly Review and Women's Review of Books.
  
  Her stories have been included in Best American Short Stories 2004 and numerous anthologies and journals including Missouri Review, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Kenyon Review, and Redbook, and in anthologies, including Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Loving a Child with Special Needs (forthcoming), I Know Some Things: Stories about Childhood by Contemporary Writers, and The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish American Writing.
  
  A past winner of the Redbook Young Writers Award, Brady is the recipient of the 2001 Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize and the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize. Brady's “Curled in the Bed of Love” won her the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction.

Works

More photos

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  • Elizabeth Blackburn and the story of telomeres: deciphering the ends of DNA

    (Blackburn's story reveals much about the tension between ...)

    2007
  • The End of the Class War

    (The little girls tumble on the lawn in their pajamas, the...)

    1999
  • Curled in the Bed of Love

    (In the title story, Jim and his HIV-positive partner cont...)

    2003
  • The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories

    (This book presents eleven new stories that are set in and...)

    2009
  • Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction

    (This book illuminates how technique serves 'story logic,'...)

    2010

Membership

Catherine was elected to the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in 2005 and served as Vice-President in 2006 and as President in 2007.