About Courtney.

Courtney Bailey, Ph.D., is a St. Louis-based writer and theatre artist who teaches among the incarcerated and system-impacted communities of Eastern Missouri. She is the only playwright in the country whose body of work is split evenly between original works for her community and work created specifically for incarcerated performers. (Learn more about her plays here.)

The Riverfront Times named her the 2023 Best St. Louis Playwright, and her play Brontë Sister House Party earned the 2022 St. Louis Theatre Circle Award for Best New Play. As a playwright and teacher, she prioritizes creating art with incarcerated artists and returning citizens. She's been privileged to work with the support of organizations such as the Folger Shakespeare Library (2024 Artistic Research Fellow), St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, The Bechdel Project, the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, Prison Performing Arts, Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble (SATE), YoungLiars, and Equally Represented Arts (ERA).

Her fiction writing is represented by Marisa Corvisiero and Katrina Lemaire at Corvisiero Literary Agency.

She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Baylor University in 2016, with a focus on Renaissance Drama, the plays of William Shakespeare, and performance studies. She completed her dissertation under the mentorship of Dr. Maurice Hunt. She also holds an MA in English from Baylor and a BA in English from Mercer University. She is an alum of the renowned SITI Company Summer Intensive (2018), where she trained in Viewpoints and Suzuki Method with SITI Company members.

She works full-time as a writer, teaching artist, and performer. Her academic and popular writing has also appeared in HowlRound, Cahiers Elisabethains, ANQ, Praxis, Literature and Belief, and Mississippi Quarterly. Her scholarly book, Spectrums of Shakespearean Crossdressing: The Art of Performing Women, was published by Routledge.

She also writes regularly on her Substack, Letters from the Homestead.