Courtney Kersten is an essayist, educator, and 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 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway, and the Image Text Workshop at Cornell University.
She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho and her PhD in Literature, Creative/Critical Writing, and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Courtney is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Dakota, a 2024-2025 American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow, and a 2025 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.