Brad Barkley grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he could often be found outdoors playing a risky neighborhood game called Sharks and Minnows with the neighbor kids until well after dusk. They also rode bikes—no helmets—to “The Pit,” a giant hole in the ground where they weren’t supposed to play. Much of the time he was outside exploring creeks or going fishing, or inside practicing magic and juggling. His love of stories began with books (My Side of the Mountain and A Separate Peace were early favorites), with 8mm Bela Lugosi, Buster Keaton, and Lon Chaney films brought home from the library and projected in his parents’ basement (usually for an audience of one), and with a fanatical devotion to Mad Magazine.
In high school he traded magic and juggling for soccer and a growing fascination with old cars, while continuing to devour the work of writers like Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. When he enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life.
His father, a civil engineer, assumed he’d become an engineer. His mother jokingly predicted brain surgeon. Nobody wanted him to major in English. Except Brad. An early creative writing teacher encouraged him after he wrote his first short story—about a dying Civil War soldier—and another professor, who taught a class analyzing Beatles lyrics, convinced him that teaching English might actually be a pretty good life.
At UNC-G he studied with Fred Chappell, Jim Clark, and Lee Zacharias, while discovering writers like Don DeLillo and J.D. Salinger. Summers were spent working odd jobs, including at a milk bottling plant, as a roofer, and in a warehouse-sized ice cream freezer where it was so cold (-32° F) employees had to step out every fifteen minutes to stand beneath a heat lamp.
After graduation he accepted what he considered his first “real job” as a technical editor for a Navy contractor in Annapolis, Maryland, where he held a Top Secret security clearance (shhh…). It paid the bills, but fiction kept calling. He began taking classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and, with one fellow student (Hi, Marie!), started a writing group that met once a month over pie and coffee at the Tastee Diner. The group eventually grew to eight members, and their encouragement helped him publish his first short stories.
Graduate school at the University of Arkansas followed, along with an MFA, lifelong writing friends, his first story collection (Circle View), and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. While supporting a young family by delivering newspapers and painting houses, he applied for teaching jobs and eventually landed at Frostburg State University in the mountains of western Maryland, where he taught for more than two decades.
Brad is the author of novels, story collections, and young adult fiction published by W.W. Norton, St. Martin’s Press, Southern Methodist University Press, Penguin/Dutton, and Regal House. His novel Money, Love was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program and named one of the year’s best books by The Washington Post and Library Journal. His most recent young adult novel, The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, and his fiction has appeared in more than forty literary magazines, including Fractured Lit, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Georgia Review. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council.
Brad and his wife, Kristin, recently traded the mountains of western Maryland for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. When he’s not writing, he’s usually taking a cold plunge, playing blues guitar, fly fishing, or drinking coffee with Kristin while their rescue dog, Millie, patiently waits for someone to throw the next toy. He still believes the best story he has written may be the next one.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Brad Barkley’s AmericaLand in 2028.
