Courtney Floyd

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About

Courtney leaning on a headstone in a cemetery, there's an engraved book on the headstone.

Photo credit: Cara Dyke Photography

Courtney Floyd grew up in New Mexico, where she learned to write between tarantula turf wars and apocalyptic dust storms. She currently lives at the bottom of a haunted mountain in the woods of Vermont with her partner and pets. Her debut fantasy novel, Higher Magic, comes out with MIRA Books on October 7th, 2025.Courtney has a PhD in British Lit and a penchant for irreverent literary allusions. Her short fiction can be found in publications including Haven Spec, Small Wonders, and Fireside Magazine, and her cozy horror audio drama, The Way We Haunt Now, is available on all major podcast platforms.

Higher Magic

In this incisive, irreverent, and whimsical dark academia novel for fans of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series and R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a struggling mage student with intense anxiety must prove that classic literature contained magic—and learn to wield her own stories to change her institution for the better.First-generation graduate student Dorothe Bartleby has one last chance to pass the Magic program’s qualifying exam after freezing with anxiety during her first attempt. If she fails to demonstrate that magic in classic literature changed the world, she’ll be kicked out of the university. And now her advisor insists she reframe her entire dissertation using Digimancy. While mages have found a way to combine computers and magic, Bartleby’s fated to never make it work.This time is no exception. Her revised working goes horribly wrong, creating a talking skull named Anne that narrates Bartleby’s inner thoughts—even the most embarrassing ones—like she's a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. Out of her depth, she recruits James, an unfairly attractive mage candidate, to help her stop Anne’s glitches in time for her exam.Instead, Anne leads them to a shocking and dangerous discovery: Magic students who seek disability accommodations are disappearing—quite literally. When the administration fails to act, Bartleby must learn to trust her own knowledge and skills. Otherwise, she risks losing both the missing students and her future as a mage, permanently.

Blurbs

"Higher Magic is my catnip. By what dark arts I know not, Floyd has summoned up a wonderful wizard-grad-school slice-of-life, replete with organizing, romance, anxiety, camaraderie, and courage. More please!"

— Max Gladstone, NYT Bestselling Co-Author of This is How You Lose the Time War

“Higher Magic is simply brilliant: a delightful mash up of dark academia and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. A magical university, found family, and a powerful championing of kindness, love, and compassion for others—this book is perfect for fans of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries and The Winx Saga. Floyd is an exciting new voice in contemporary fantasy, and her debut is a higher kind of magic indeed.”

— Jen Sugden, author of High Vaultage

"Dorothe Bartleby is an absolute delight. For anyone who’s ever idly pondered returning to higher education for another degree, save yourself the crushing student debt and read Higher Magic instead. Floyd’s heartwarming debut conjures all the fond familiarity of academia with righteous critique of its worst parts. An outrageously original magic system, real and relatable characters, themes of belonging, self-determination, and community, A+ romance, and some of the best disability representation I’ve read—not to mention the charming talking skull—make this an entrancing page-turner."

— Leanne Schwartz, author of A Prayer for Vengeance and To a Darker Shore

"Higher Magic is the subversive, dry-humored, disability justice-oriented dark academia book of my heart. Between the truly ingenious magic system, potent renderings of grad school trauma (and community!), an edge-of-your-seat mystery, and a romance that had me cackling, I couldn’t put this book down. Actual witchcraft."

— P. H. Low, Locus- and Rhysling-nominated author of These Deathless Shores

"Timely, twisty and immensely clever, Higher Magic is both a love letter to the written word and a rallying cry for the disenfranchised."

— Frances White, Sunday Times bestselling author of Voyage of the Damned

“Higher Magic is enchanting, affirming, and an astonishingly realistic representation of my own experience in grad school (which is a delightful thing to say about a book that also features a most loquacious narration skull). Courtney Floyd’s intelligent, inclusive novel captures the challenges of navigating academia as a disabled person...while ultimately celebrating the bravery of living and learning in spite of an oppressive system.”— Sylvie Cathrall, author of A Letter to the Luminous Deep

“A brilliant celebration of friendship, education, and refusal to surrender in the face of injustice, all set in a magical university that anyone who has ever battled through the joys and torments of postgraduate study will find hauntingly familiar. Witty, compassionate, and fiercely intelligent.”
— H.G. Parry, author of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

Writing

Novels

Higher Magic

In this incisive, irreverent, and whimsical dark academia novel for fans of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series and R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a struggling mage student with intense anxiety must prove that classic literature contained magic—and learn to wield her own stories to change her institution for the better.

Audio Drama

The Way We Haunt Now

English instructor Eulalie Elizabeth Reed accidentally awakens a Victorian ghost by fixing the phonograph it’s bound to. Now she, and the ghost, must learn how to live with the consequences…The show ended in 2024 after its third season.

Poetry

"Renfield at His Windowsill." Small Wonders, 2025.

Short Stories

"Music, Murder, Murmuration." Haven Spec, 2024.

"Ever since her sisters kicked her out of the family band, Cyrene had been searching for someone she could harmonize with. The problem was her auditions had a nasty habit of turning into massacres. Figurative, sure. But also, inevitably, literal..."

“Ask a Hearth Witch.” Wizards in Space vol. 9, 2024.

"I think I might have made an unforgiveable mistake. My girlfriend recently moved in with me. It’s been amazing, except that she thinks I’m being unreasonable when I tell her we have to keep our hair from going down the shower drain..."

“CoverLetter_Version5.” Small Wonders, 2023.

"Four other versions of me crowd around the kitchen table, waiting for version five to get done with the bathroom. Or for breakfast. Or for me to say something. Or for anything, really. All they do is wait, wait, wait.Until they don’t..."

“Hair of the Dog.” Apex’s Strange Libations anthology, 2023.

"They say the best way to cure a hangover is to postpone it, sip by sip, until your days are made meaningless in the liminal space between wreck and regret..."

“A Post-Modern Oracle.” Fireside Magazine, 2018.

"The Sybil’s teaching Modernist poetry at a small college in New Mexico these days. You can find her, if you seek her, in a cave-like office on the second floor..."

“H&D Plumbing.” Fireside Magazine, 2017.

"“Does your toilet burble, threateningly, when you walk into the bathroom?” a woman on the TV asked. Her words were soft, but danced with the rhythm of a slight Mexican accent..."

Essays & Academic Writing

  • "Updating the Curriculum: 2025 SFFH Dark Academia Novels You Won’t Want to Miss." Psychopomp, July 2025.

  • “Beyond Dark Academia: The Real Horror in Magic School is Systemic Inequality.” Tor.com, Oct. 2021.

  • “‘Take it when tendered’: M.E. Braddon’s Thou Art the Man (1894) and the Weekly Telegraph’s Media Model of Disability.” Victorian Review, January 2020.

  • “‘Always the same unrememberable revelation’: Thoreau’s Telegraph Harp, the Development of an Immanent Romantic Secularism, and Golden Age Children’s Literature.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 2019.

  • “Braddon’s ‘Waiting,’ Poetic Aesthetics, and Disability Studies.” Guest Post for the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association Blog, 2015.

  • “Blogging Academia.” Guest Post for University of Oregon Digital Humanities Blog, 2016.

  • “‘To Read Her Face’: Investigating the Body in the Serial Edition of Braddon’s Thou Art the Man.” Victorian Review, 2020.

Podcasts

Unfortunately...

Unfortunately... is a podcast about fiction, failure, and moving forward, co-hosted by speculative fiction authors Mona West and Courtney Floyd.There are plenty of master classes for writers, but this... this is a disaster class. New episodes release on the first and third Friday of every month.

Victorian Scribblers

Victorian Scribblers is a podcast about the nineteenth-century writers time forgot, from Mary Elizabeth Braddon (the mother of detective fiction) to Marie Corelli (queer science-fiction writer extraordinaire) and beyond. Hosted by Dr. Courtney Floyd, a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and print culture, and Dr. Eleanor Dumbill, a specialist in Victorian literature and publishing.The show ran from 2017-2022.

Lit Slashing

A short-form spin-off of Victorian Scribblers in which Eleanor and Courtney shared history’s most notorious bad, backhanded, & brutal reviews of literary classics.

Contact

For literary inquiries, please contact Rebecca Matte of Bradford Literary Agency.
For everything else, use the contact form below to get in touch:

Social Media

Courtney can be found on Bluesky as @courtney-floyd.com and Instagram as @cannfloyd. As of November 2024, she is no longer on Twitter (X).