Anna Kovatcheva - starkly memorable imagery, strangeness that feels natural to the story, the feeling that the story itself grew up from the earth like a tree, and an ending that defies moralization

Anna Kovatcheva, The White Swallow, Gold Line Press, 2015.
www.kovatcheva.com/




The White Swallow has so many things going for it — starkly memorable imagery, strangeness that feels natural to the story, the feeling that the story itself grew up from the earth like a tree, and an ending that defies moralization. It seems instead to reflect the same unpredictable and mysterious quality of the world that also lets birds go into girls and healing to occur and, for inside all that, love to blossom.— Aimee Bender, judge of the 2014 Fiction Chapbook Competition

Anna Kovatcheva is a brilliant young talent. Her prose is effervescent, toughly lyric, sensuous and sharp-eyed. The White Swallow is so fluently written, one can virtually feel the swallow's wings beating. And the story of the intense friendship of young girls, realized virtually in front of their elders' (unseeing) eyes, is a small miracle, tragically curtailed. But the narrator survives—in language that is a flight of its own.— Joyce Carol Oates


Excerpt:

For strong bones, the old wives recommend blood of a blackbird in a pot of fresh yogurt. She heard ribs grind and straighten, heard them knit together. The cat’s ruptured stomach stitched itself whole, skin and fur slid back into place. The lungs reinflated.




Journal Publications
"The Country is Its Birds" — The Kenyon Review Online, 2015. (Fiction)
"Sudba 1" — The Iowa Review, 2015. (Fiction)Anthologized: "Proprioception," Menacing Hedge: A Limited-Edition Poetry Anthology for AWP 2014. Ed. Kelly Boyker Guillemette. 2014. (Poetry)
"Proprioception," "Self Portrait as Farm Animal, HB 954," and "Positions" — Menacing Hedge, 2014. (Poetry)
"Post-Modern Escapism: The Zombie Movie as New-Wave Western" — Movable Type, 2012. (Essay)
"September" — The Kenyon Review, 2012. Short Fiction Contest Runner-Up, 2011. (Fiction)
"Crocodiles in Korea" — Used Furniture Review, 2011. (Fiction)
"Save Poor Bob, If You Please" — Vagabond, 2009. (Fiction)
Why #SaveSweetBriar? — March 2015
The KR Conversations: Micro-Inverview — The Kenyon Review Online, 2012. (Interview)



Anna Kovatcheva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from New York University. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she works as a graphic designer by day and writes of Bulgaria by night.