Websites
Biography
Courtney Kersten is an essayist, educator, and author of two books. Her second book, Follow the Signs, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2026. She is also the author of Daughter in Retrograde (University of Wisconsin Press 2018). Her essays have won prizes from the Bellingham Review, the Southern Indiana Review, and Crazyhorse and been listed as “notable” in the 2020, 2021, and 2023 Best American Essays series. Her work has garnered her a Fulbright Fellowship to Riga, Latvia and support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kunstnarhuset Messen (Ålvik, Norway), and the Image Text Workshop at Cornell University.
Courtney is a 2025 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.
Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Feminist Studies and Women's Literature, Post-Humanism and Animal Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz; PhD in Literature with an emphasis in Creative/Critical Writing and Feminist Studies, 2022
University of Idaho, MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction), 2016