F. Brinley Bruton has been a journalist for over ten years, and worked in Kabul, Mexico City, Philadelphia, and New York City. Now based in London, she is a senior writer / editor at msnbc.com, a leader in breaking news and original journalism online. The site is a joint venture between NBC News and Microsoft and gets over a billion page views a month.

Before joining MSNBC.com, Brinley wrote about security, business and finance, international development and women's issues. She has worked at Reuters in London and New York, and her pieces have appeared in the New Statesman, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Long Island Newsday, The Star-Ledger, and Arabies Trends, among others. She also wrote and blogged for AlertNet, Reuters' humanitarian news website.

In October 2004, Brinley took a sabbatical from Reuters and moved to Afghanistan to train journalists and help set up Pajhwok Afghan News, the country's largest independent news service. She led Pajhwok's reconstruction, economics, society and sports sections, and focused on developing each reporter's professional standards and personal writing style. While in Afghanistan, she travelled to Farah province on the border with Iran to interview Malalai Joya, a young woman who risked her life to run for parliament on an anti-warlord platform. The profile of Joya, who went on to win the election, appeared in the UK's New Statesman. Since her return, Brinley has worked as a freelance journalist, writing about the re-establishment of the BBC's Arabic-language TV service and the struggle to control aid money in Guatemala.

Brinley also worked for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered a traditional farming region's painful transformation into suburbia, and at The News in Mexico, where she wrote about the country's struggles with democracy and liberal economics.

She received a Masters degree from Columbia University's graduate school of journalism in 1999, where she was also named a Cabot Scholar for her work in Latin America. She completed her BA, cum laude, at Barnard College, Columbia University. Between leaving Barnard and moving to Mexico City to join The News, Brinley worked for three years with microfinance NGO Women's World Banking. Born and raised in Latin America, Brinley is a native Spanish speaker.

Brinley’s fiction has been published in U.S. literary journals BrickStreet and Salt River Review. She is an advanced (Kaiden) student of Ikebana, an ancient form of Japanese flower arranging.