Cortney Davis

Cortney Davis is a registered nurse, poet and essayist living in Connecticut. Although in college she studied art and literature, hoping to meld the visual and the written word, fate and the need for a steady income led her to work as a nurse's aide, then as a surgical tech, then as an RN and ultimately as a nurse practitioner. Her early love for poetry and her acquired love for caring for others remained separate until one of her favorite patients died in spite of all that medicine and nursing could offer. Not knowing how to deal with the twin emotions of sadness and failure to heal, Cortney wrote a poem about that patient, honoring her life and releasing her to death, but also holding on to her, in the poem, forever. Since then, Cortney's work in poetry and prose often focuses on the mysterious and transcendent world of health and disease, caregiver and patient, parent and child. Her writing is not sentimental--it doesn't gloss over the difficulties or the sorrow of illness or relationship--but instead offers a human and honest look at how we care, or fail to care, for one another. Cortney's honors include an NEA Poetry Fellowhip, three CT Commission on the Arts Poetry Grants, three American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Awards, the CT Center for the Book Non-Fiction Award, and an Independent Publishers' Silver Medal in Non-Fiction. Visit her website at www.cortneydavis.com