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. Her image/text chapbook Address Unknown is forthcoming in New Letters in Spring 2025. 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 Image Text Workshop at Cornell University, Kunstnarhuset Messen (Ålvik, Norway), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
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 and a 2025 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.