About the Author

Courtney Cook is a writer and communications leader based in Wilder, Vermont. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post Book World, Poets & Writers, the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and Bloodroot Literary Magazine. Her Salon essay “How to Leave a Soldier,” which charts the arc of her first marriage along the lines of U.S. military engagements, and her Dartmouth Alumni Magazine essay “Love and Empire,” which tells the story of a moment during her time as a student mom, are drawn from the material that became this book. She also writes “Survival by Book,” a Substack newsletter about arts, culture, and technology.

Courtney graduated from Dartmouth College with honors in English in 1993. Her senior thesis, “Mary, Misogyny, and the Medieval Feminine Ideal: A Study of Chaucer’s Pious Estheticism,” looked at the tension between devotion and subjugation in medieval literary representations of women and was her earliest attempt to answer the questions at the heart of this memoir. She later earned a Master of Creative Arts, from the University of Wollongong in Australia. She taught English literature for ten years at independent schools including Phillips Exeter Academy.

Her professional career has been built on using her love for words to connect with all kinds of audiences. She is a former high school English teacher who has also led brand and executive communications through acquisitions at Veracross, written for Dartmouth College’s multi-billion-dollar capital campaign, and developed global community engagement strategies for TomTom and the OpenStreetMap Foundation. She has worked across education, philanthropy, open-source technology, and SaaS, always as the person in the room who translates what’s happening into a story that other people can hold onto.

College, A Love Story is her first book. She lives in Vermont not far from the campus where the story begins.