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Courtney Zoffness is the author of the nonfiction debut Spilt Milk (McSweeney’s, 2021), named one of the best memoirs of 2021 by BookPage. It received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, BookPage, and Booklist. Also a fiction writer, Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the most valuable international prize for short fiction, amid entries from 38 countries. She joins a winners list that includes Anthony Doerr, Junot Díaz, and Susan Choi. Other honors include an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction, the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and two residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, The Southern Review, Guernica, and elsewhere, and she had essays listed as “notable” in Best American Essays in 2018 and 2019.

In an interview with Book Page, Zoffness was asked about the role of research in memoir, and what was the most interesting thing she had to research in the course of writing the book: "Curiously, I did the most research on topics I thought I understood. The more questions I asked, the less I realized I knew. This held true especially for “Boy in Blue,” about my young, white son’s predilection for dressing and acting like a cop, a role inspired by our living beside a New York City precinct station. I wound up in some dark research holes, reading about everything from the slave patrol practices that inspired modern-day policing to the recent brain science that exempts juvenile offenders from being put to death. Much of this didn’t make it onto the page, but it all informed the writing."

Zoffness holds graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona, and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught English at a dozen different colleges, and delivered readings and talks at venues across the US and abroad. Currently she directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University, and lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.