Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Saveur, Oxford American, New York, Wired, and others. Her writing has been anthologized in The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell (Ohio University Press, 2019) Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing (UGA Press, 2014) and nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is a board member of the Appalachian Food Summit and a writing editorial board member of Looking at Appalachia: Call and Response, a textual-visual project examining the region 50+ years after the War on Poverty. (Submit to Call and Response here.) She is also the creator and host of WMFA, a podcast about why and how we write.

Courtney holds a bachelor's degree in news journalism from West Virginia University and a master's degree in magazine journalism from New York University. Her teaching experience includes Wayne State University; Sweet Briar College, where she was an inaugural Sweet Briar College-Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Teaching Fellow; and Catapult, where she teaches an online workshop about writing place.

A native West Virginian, Courtney is at work on a novel set in Appalachia. She lives and works in Pittsburgh.