B I O

Carol Edgarian is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Rise the Euphrates, Three Stages of Amazement, and Vera. She is a leading force in bringing diverse voices to the fore as co-founder and editor of the non-profit publisher Narrative.

Her debut novel, Rise the Euphrates (1994), followed the lives of three generations of Armenian women in the wake of the Armenian Genocide. In its review, The Washington Post cited Rise the Euphrates as “a book whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity, and finally ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today—daring, heartbreaking, and affirmative, giving order and sense to our random lives.” Rise the Euphrates was awarded the ANC Freedom Prize, and a twentieth-anniversary revised edition of the novel was released to mark the centennial of the Armenian Genocide.

Carol’s second novel, Three Stages of Amazement (2011), is both a love story and social chronicle of a turbulent America at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. The novel reached The New York Times Best Seller List in its first week of publication, O Magazine chose it as a Top Pick, and Indiebound selected it as a Pick of the Month. Three Stages of Amazement was called “furiously compelling” by Janet Maslin at The New York Times and “superbly crafted, skillfully plotted” by The Washington Post.

Carol’s third and most recent novel, Vera (2021), was an immediate national bestseller. Set in 1906 San Francisco in the days and weeks after the city’s devastating historic earthquake, Vera tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl, the daughter of the town’s leading madam, coming of age and centers on themes of displacement, societal upheaval, and reinvention with a cinematic cast of well-known as well as fictional characters. An O Magazine Most Anticipated Read, and an Indiebound Pick of the Month, a Booklist Starred Review cited the novel as “Brilliantly conceived and beautifully realized,” and the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote, “If there’s a book that speaks urgently to a time of grief, resilience, wounding loneliness, and collective hope in one of the deadliest pandemics in history, it is Vera — a work to be cherished for what it uncovers in the pages and, possibly, the heart of the reader.”

In 2003, Carol and her husband Tom Jenks co-founded the non-profit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays, and art. Dedicated to encouraging reading without paywalls, and to supporting writers by paying them fairly for their work, Narrative publishes hundreds of artists each year and is widely read across generations, in schools, and around the globe. Its entire library of thousands of works of literature by celebrated authors and by the best emerging writers is available for free.

In 2014, Carol launched Narrative for Schools, which supports under-resourced teachers and students by providing Narrative’s free library of literature and other digital educational tools, easily accessible for today’s hybrid classrooms. Today, Narrative for Schools is used in classrooms throughout the US and in more than thirty-seven countries.

Carol’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer’s life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World’s Great Writers. She is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from “Why Stories Matter” to “The Art of Fiction” to  publishing today. Her weekly instagram series A Word, Please explores popular and forgotten words as the basis for stories about our past and present.

Born in New Britain, Connecticut, to first-generation American parents, Carol is a graduate of Phillips Andover and Stanford University. She lives with her family in San Francisco.