Andrew Krivak Books in Order

Andrew Krivak was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1963 and grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, in a family of engineers. He is the grandson of Slovak immigrants, and stories handed down by his family, about the old country, hard work, hunger, and making a life in America, stayed with him long before they became material for fiction.

He first thought of himself as a poet. At St. John's College in Annapolis, he read Homer and Plato, translated texts, and worked through Euclidean proofs. Before heading to New York for Columbia University's MFA writing program, he worked as a yacht rigger in a Cape Cod boatyard. His early poetry work taught him to pay close attention to sound, rhythm, and the physical details of a scene.

After Columbia, work with Jesuit priests in the South Bronx gave him another direction. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in Syracuse and spent eight years in formation, living and studying in Syracuse, the Bronx, Moscow, Bratislava, and the Dominican Republic. The discipline suited him, but the vow of obedience eventually felt at odds with his need to write.

He left the order in 1998, with its blessing.

Stories became the bridge. A Long Retreat is his memoir about religious life, faith, self-knowledge, and the hard work of deciding what kind of life to live. It gave Krivak a way to ask personal questions plainly, and it cleared room for the fiction he had wanted to write.

The next step came from research and family memory. Krivak traveled to the region where his grandmother grew up, learned Slovak, and met relatives whose lives made the old stories feel immediate. Those experiences fed The Sojourn, his 2011 debut novel, about Jozef Vinich, a young man pulled from Colorado to rural Austria-Hungary and then into World War I. The book was a National Book Award finalist and won the Chautauqua Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

It also began the Dardan books, joined by The Signal Flame and Like the Appearance of Horses. Set largely in northeastern Pennsylvania, these novels follow the Vinich family across generations, wars, migrations, separations, and returns. Readers who enjoy them often come for the family story as much as the history: people trying to keep faith with one another and with the land beneath them.

Place matters just as much in The Bear, a spare future-set story about a father, a daughter, and the knowledge needed to survive in a changed world. Krivak keeps his attention on practical things, fish, weather, stars, animals, and the ways people learn by watching.

With Mule Boy, he returns to Pennsylvania coal country in 1929. The novel follows thirteen-year-old Ondro Prach, whose work underground and experience of a mine collapse leave a mark that lasts for decades. It brings Krivak back to the immigrant communities and inherited memories that run through much of his work.

Krivak has also taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Boston College, and Harvard. He lives with his wife and three children between Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and works as a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University.