Welcome
I am a novelist and Professor Emeritus at Chapman University in Orange, California. I left full-time academic work at the end of 2018 to focus on writing and travel. I now write fiction and short essays, backpack and day-hike in the deserts of the American Southwest, and travel the world.
Recent book
Dessa’s Crossing: A Novel and Other Stories
Dessa’s Crossing is the story of a promise that becomes a trap. It follows a search-and-rescue volunteer living inside a vow made in grief—to help raise the son her twin left behind.
The novel moves between the Pacific Northwest, California, and the villages of Bulgaria, tracing one woman’s reckoning with duty and the cost of freedom. The novel and seven linked short stories form a single, unfolding arc.
Current work
My current major project is an alternate-history campus novel set between an authoritarian version of the United States and Australia, under the working title United Republics of America, 1989: A Campus Comedy.
Books
Fiction (English)
Fiction (Bulgarian)
- На парти при президента (At the President’s Party, 2016; new edition 2021).
- Спасителката (The Rescuer, 2019).
Technical books (selection)
- Python First: The Joy of Success (Llumina Press, 2007).
- Four computer science books in Bulgarian.
Much of my writing, including both fiction and technical work, is cataloged in WorldCat.
Background
I was born and educated in Bulgaria. I studied computational mathematics and computer science at Sofia University, where I received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees, and a Doctor of Science degree. I worked as a research scientist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and as a professor at Sofia University.
In 1990 I moved to the United States for a visiting professorship at Clark University in Massachusetts. I later held appointments at Southwest State University in Minnesota and at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, before joining Chapman University in California in 2001. Chapman University granted me emeritus status in 2019.
My research in computer science covered high-performance computing, programming languages, databases, and computer science education, with support from the National Science Foundation and NASA. I am the author of five technical books and more than seventy scholarly publications.
Around 2012 I began to shift my writing from technical subjects to fiction. My first two novels were written and published in Bulgarian. My first English-language fiction book, Dessa’s Crossing: A Novel and Other Stories, draws on my daughter’s experience in mountain search and rescue in the Pacific Northwest.
Contact
Email: radenski@chapman.edu
“To live is to change.” — J. H. Newman