Photo: Ivan Morozov

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is an American author who was born and raised in the Soviet Union. Kristina moved to the U.S. in 1995, after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain. She holds a B.A. in English from Moscow State Linguistic University, an M.A. in English from Radford University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University. 

Kristina’s stories and essays appeared in Zyzzyva, Subtropics, Zoetrope: All Story, Lithub, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Her fiction was selected as a finalist for multiple awards, including eleven Pushcart Prize nominations and four special mentions in the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Kristina is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tennessee Williams Scholarship and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the 2026 Fellowship in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the recipient of the 2026 CRAFT Award for Excellence in Short Fiction for her story “A Christmas Carol: 2024.” Her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Stanford William Saroyan International Prize.   

Her debut novel, The Orchard, was included by NY Post among the best books of the year and was a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize. The paperback edition is a Penguin Random House Book Club title.

Foreign rights have been sold to Germany, Netherlands, U.K., Italy, and France.