Courtney Kampa was born in Virginia and reared there. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Virginia and her master’s degree at Columbia University. Kampa was also a Wallace Stegner Fellowship scholar at Stanford University from 2017 to 2019. She began her career as a ballet dancer before transitioning to writing.
Kampa was a prolific writer with a number of works to her credit. She was included in several prestigious periodicals, including the Boston Review, the Journal, the Atlantic, Poets & Writers magazine, and the National Poetry Review. She published her first book, Our Lady of Not Asking Why, which was a compilation of her poems.
Her writing has received several honors, including the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award in 2014, and she was a Ruth Lily Prize nominee in 2016. Mary Szybist chose Our Lady of Not Asking Why for the New Issues Press First Book Award.
