First Rule of Swimming (Brkic)

Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia, USA
• Education—College of William and Mary; M.F.A., New
   York University
• Awards—Whiting Writers' Award
• Currently—lives near Washington, D.C.


Courtney Angela Brkic is Croatian American memoirist, short story writer, and novelist. A native of Washington, D.C., she grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and graduated from Yorktown High School. She studied archaeology at the College of William and Mary, and graduated from New York University with an MFA.

In 1996, she went to eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a Physicians for Human Rights forensic team, then worked as a summary translator for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She has taught creative writing at New York University, the Cooper Union, and Kenyon College, where she held the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing in 2006.

Her short story collection Stillness won the 2003 Whiting Writers' Award. Stone Fields, an exploration of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, was published in 2004. Her debut novel, The First Rule of Swimming, came out in 2013.

Brkic is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts and Literature grant, a Fulbright Scholarship to research women in Croatia's war-afflicted population, and a New York Times fellowship. She teaches at George Mason University and lives near Washington, D.C. with her husband and son. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/6/2013.)