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. Kersten is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota, a 2024-2025 American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow, and a 2025 Artistin-Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.