Courtney Huse Wika believes in the art of collection: overheard quotes, bird facts, forgotten stories, and rescue animals. She is a 2023 finalist for the new millennium writing award for her poem "Disposition," a long-list poet for the 2022 emerging voices prize, and a 2021 finalist for the james hearst poetry prize for "this bird is trying to break your heart." She is the author of Perch, a chapbook of nature poetry from Anchor and Plume Press, and her creative work has appeared widely, including North american review, south dakota review, calyx, NEw Ohio Review, The Halcyone Review, South Dakota in POems, Kindred, Midwestern Gothic, South Dakota Magazine, Scissors and Spackle, Backwards City Review, Paddlefish, 605 Magazine, Life on the Farm and Ranch: A South Dakota Anthology, and The MacGuffin. Her collaborative work with artist Becky Grismer has also appeared in numerous juried shows and galleries in the United States. She received her BA in Philosophy and English from Augustana University, and her MA and PhD in English with a specialization in Creative Writing from the University of South Dakota. She is currently DISTINGUISHED Faculty and a Professor of English AT BLACK HILLS STATE UNIVERSITY.

Praise for Perch
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The gorgeously organic poems of place, nature, animals, and memory in Courtney Huse Wika’s Perch are infused with light, sky, and birdsong, and pierced by haunting moments of loss and loneliness. These elegiac lyrics of weathered and weathering seasons reveal a poet who sees with a keen eye and feels with a tender heart all of the splendor and cruelty of South Dakota’s Black Hills; one who acutely discerns the languages of trees and birds; one who will—“like the common nighthawk / winging through the darkness”—snatch “fireflies from the night sky / to lay a hundred stars at your feet.”
—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians
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In the poems contained in Perch, Courtney Huse-Wika finds seams between the human and natural worlds and explores them with such unerring ease and clarity that the worlds are revealed as co-creations. These poems emanate from a core of longing but explore it in a such a way that we’re not quite sure whether it comes out of the human heart or into us from the world. It may be expressed in the broken bodies of birds, or the empty trees from which a bullet has chased them, or by the repressed and powerful action of a woman so stingy and hard-bitten she will expend nothing on her husband’s funeral other than a single orange, but which, in Courtney Huse Wika’s adept handling, becomes an outrageous lavishing of grief and loss.
—Kent Meyers, Author of Twisted Tree and The Work of Wolves

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