Courtney Kersten
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Assistant Professor, English
- Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Feminist Studies, Women's Literature, Animal Studies
Contact Info
- Email: courtney.kersten@UND.edu
- Office: 701.777.3323
Office Address
English
Merrifield Hall Room 240D
276 Centennial Drive Stop 7209
Grand Forks, ND 58202-7209
Biography
Courtney Kersten (who publishes as Courtney Ann LaFaive) is an essayist, educator, and author of two books. Her second book is, Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America's Forgotten Astrology Queen which Publisher's Weekly described as a book that "taps into the uncanny underside of storytelling" (University of Iowa Press, 2026). She is also the author of Daughter in Retrograde (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) and the chapbook Address Unknown (New Letters, 2025). 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 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Image Text Workshop at Cornell University, Kunstnarhuset Messen (Ålvik, Norway), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
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
- Courtney has also taken workshops with Corporeal Writing, Fine Arts Work Center, and StoryCorps Chicago, among others.