photograph of Courtney Sender

Courtney Sender is a writer of fiction and essays. Her debut book of braided stories, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me, is available now.

Praised as “compelling” by Kirkus, “a stunner” by Deesha Philyaw in The Millions, “literary rock ‘n’ roll” by Aimee Bender, “fierce” by Alice McDermott, “impossibly strange and mercifully familiar” by Danielle Evans, “a miraculous balance between the personal and the universal” by Ann Patchett.

Courtney has written for The New York Times’ Modern Love and The Atlantic, where she was one of the first English-language cultural critics of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People. Her fiction is forthcoming in Ploughshares Spring 2023 edited by Alice Hoffman, and has appeared in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, American Short Fiction, Slice, Glimmer Train, and many others.

She is staff writer for the #1-charting iHeart podcast Noble Blood.

A Yaddo and MacDowell fellow, Courtney was the George Bennett writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, a B.A. from Yale, and a theology degree from Harvard Divinity School.

This collection expands and celebrates, even as it sometimes upends, what it means to tell a love story.

Alice McDermott