The descendant of Polish immigrants, Brigid spent most of her childhood in a farming township in Northern Illinois, population 500. In 1994 at the age of 22, she arrived in Krakow with no place to stay, no job, no contacts and no knowledge of the language. She quickly fell in love with the place, learned Polish, and decided to live there for one year. Brigid is still a frequent visitor to Krakow; she has also worked, studied or volunteered in Italy, Germany, Russia, England and Ukraine. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (MA) and currently teaches at Whitney Young Magnet High School in the Chicago Public Schools. A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True is her first novel. It won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

Books by Brigid Pasulka

A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True

by Brigid Pasulka - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

On the eve of World War II, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. To court Anielica Hetmanskáhe offers up his “golden hands” and transforms her family’s modest hut into a beautiful home, thereby building his way into her heart. But war arrives to cut short their courtship and send the young lovers far from home to the promise of a new life in Kraków.