Alum Turns Life Experiences Into Award-Nominated Stories

Campus Communications Staff / Mar 05, 2025

photo of michelle brady with bookcase backgroundMichelle Brady is enjoying her re-emergence as a writer. Photo courtesy of Mark Randall Photography.
Alum Michelle Brady ’07, a military veteran and attorney, proves it’s never too late to return to the literary world.

After a long break, the writing career of Michelle Brady ’07 has gained serious momentum this past year. She published 18 stories, two of which were recently nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she launched her own literary magazine. Michelle’s re-emergence as a writer follows profound experiences in the military, serving as a combat helicopter pilot, and as an attorney. 

"I wanted to experience life on a deeper level, to have stories to tell that weren’t just about what I saw from my apartment window," Brady says.  

From Nebraska Cornfields to Detainment Camps in Iraq 

Growing up in Nebraska, Michelle enlisted in the Army Reserves to pay for college, initially planning to study horticulture in her home state because it seemed like a practical choice. But Michelle was soon deployed to Iraq, where she spent 15 months mostly working in detainment camps. She returned with a new perspective about her future and landed a ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) scholarship, which pays for tuition in exchange for a commitment to serve in the armed forces after graduation. The scholarship would pave the way to a degree studying what she loved most – writing – and a military career that would expose her to new experiences and places. 

And so, she came to Columbia, where she earned her BFA in Fiction Writing.  

While at Columbia, Michelle participated in an editorial exchange with Bath Spa University, where she took MFA classes, wrote, and worked on editing an anthology. 

And it was her professors at Columbia who submitted her work for her first literary award, and it was at Columbia where she had opportunities to share her work in a public forum.  

"My time at Columbia was formative for me," she says. "I learned so much about craft and the publishing world, and Chicago’s cultural richness inspired my creativity in ways I never expected." 

Shifting Gears 

After graduation, Michelle earned her commission as an officer and began flight school to become a helicopter pilot. She served in the Army for 15 years, but she didn’t write a single word during that time. The rigorous and often draining demands of military life stifled her creativity rather than emboldened it.  

She then shifted gears and enrolled in law school, eventually becoming an attorney and serving as a judicial clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans' Claims. Her legal writing sparked something, though, and writing legal articles soon led to writing stories. 

When faced with multiple family crises, Michelle poured herself into writing as a form of catharsis. It was raw and unpolished, she says, but it was the beginning of something bigger. She began networking with other writers on Twitter and submitting stories to literary magazines, eventually publishing 18 stories in one year and starting her own literary magazine, “House of Arcanum,” to offer opportunities to other writers.  

Her fiction has been included in “The Forge Literary Magazine,” “Arts & Letters,” “Lunch Ticket,” “Fractured Lit,” and others. She has been awarded a Gold Circle Award for fiction from the Columbia University SPA and was a finalist for Fractured Lit’s Fiction Open, the Wright Prize, and Regal House Publishing’s W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections. And two of her stories were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.  

Turning Stories Into a Novel 

With the encouragement of editors, Michelle turned her collection of stories into a novel. The book, which explores the intersection of motherhood and war, became an exploration of the contradictory nature of life—how women can create life as well as take it away.  

“There aren’t many women who have experienced that,” she says. “And really, only a woman can.”  

Michelle is currently looking find a literary agent and publisher for her book while balancing work, family, and her writing.  

While her path to writing was far from straight, Michelle’s own story only proves that it’s never too late to pursue your dreams and do what you love.  

Check out “House of Arcanum."

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