Writer. Director. Producer.

About Courtney.

Celebrated Author, Innerspace Explorer, Creative Journeywoman.

Having lived and worked all over the world, including 10 U.S. cities and 3 countries, Courtney moved to Charleston, West Virginia in 2022 with a Covid-era fever dream of property renovation and building an urban farm.

Five years later, she is now proud owner of a small herd of animals and juggling several wide-ranging projects—from writing a memoir, tentatively titled Prodigal Daughter, to producing a film about Tehran's rescue workers, Through Broken Doors, to renovating a new house in Savannah, Georgia.

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Her 20 years of publishing credits include: New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, Post Road, BOMB, Alfred Dunhill, Another Man, Whitewall, i-D, Wallpaper, Opening Ceremony Annual and Civilized.

  • “Courtney is one of my very favorite living short-story writers. She has courage and vision like few writers, an amazing ear, and compassion like nobody else at all. When I read her, I feel better about literature and better about the world. Want to know what really makes human beings tick? Throw away everything on your bedside table and read this instead.”

    Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, The Black Veil and Purple America

  • "Eldridge is a cartographer of the compulsive mind and the nearly unbearable sorrow that smolders under earth. Her stories are prayers for redemption in a landscape where the banal is grotesque, the sacred profane. A wise and brave work by a remarkable new writer.”

    Julia Slavin, author of The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidenstone Club

  • "Courtney Eldridge is one of the smartest young writers in America, and she knows how to use knives. There are echoes of Dixon here, and Moody, and Wallace, and maybe even early Carver—great technical control masking great emotional upheaval. All of these stories, after their meanderings, their circlings and jokes and asides, deliver a measurable catharsis, and it’s all the more powerful for how painful—though that pain is wrapped and rewrapped, hidden and denied—it was to get there.”

    Dave Eggers, author of You Shall Know Our Velocity, What Is the What, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

  • “Courtney Eldridge is a striking voice on the literary horizon. Whenever I read one of her stories in print, I know I’m in for trouble—in the best possible way. She’s a talent to be reckoned with.”

    Frederick Barthelme, author of The Brothers, Painted Desert, and The Law of Averages

  • “If I needed someone to crawl inside my head and kindly record the nuttiness found there, I’d entrust the job to no one but Eldridge.”

    Ruminator Review

  • “Neurosis is to Eldridge’s stories what suburbia was to Cheever’s: it’s at once context, antagonist and meta subject. Her brilliant trick is to write in a voice that’s so colloquially familiar that we don’t automatically classify these crazy people as ‘the other’ but rather recognize them as our friends, our family members or even ourselves.”

    The New York Times Book Review

  • “Each piece is no less than arresting, and more than one ranks as a tour de force of quirky style and insight.”

    Boston Globe

Interviews

BOMB Magazine Pt. 1

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BOMB Magazine Pt. 2

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Culture.org

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Kenyon Review

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Juked

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