Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State English Professor Catherine Pierce—also serving as Mississippi’s Poet Laureate—officially is being recognized for this prestigious, statewide appointment on April 11.
Created in 1963, Mississippi’s Poet Laureate serves as the official state poet, creating and reading poetry at state occasions and agency activities, and representing the Magnolia State’s rich cultural heritage. The Office of the Governor, in partnership with the Mississippi Arts Commission and Mississippi’s other cultural agencies, appoints the position to a four-year term. Pierce is MSU’s first Poet Laureate, with her term expiring in April 2025.
The public is invited to celebrate Pierce at the MSU College of Arts and Sciences Institute for the Humanities program “A Conversation and Reading with Mississippi Poet Laureate Catherine Pierce” at 3 p.m. in historic Lee Hall’s Bettersworth Auditorium.
After the event, Pierce will be available to sign copies of her publications and previously signed works will be available for sale.
“I am extremely proud of Dr. Catherine Pierce and her designation as Mississippi’s Poet Laureate by Gov. Tate Reeves and the Mississippi Arts Commission,” said MSU President Mark E. Keenum. “Her well-deserved selection as our state’s Poet Laureate speaks volumes about the exceptional quality of our faculty and the opportunities our students have to interact with talented, accomplished educators in our classrooms. I look forward to participating in this special recognition of Dr. Pierce’s accomplishments.”
Pierce said her work as Poet Laureate is rooted in her belief that “poetry is for everyone.”
“I so often hear people say that they never felt like poetry was for them—a key part of my work is to help change that perception. There are so many ways to write a poem, so many ways to read one,” said Pierce, a two-time national Pushcart Prize winner and co-director of MSU’s Creative Writing program.
“My official duties are to help promote poetry and the literary arts across the state and to represent the rich cultural heritage of Mississippi. I get to talk with schools and community organizations, help folks write poems of their own, and find ways to shine a light on the incredible poetry community in Mississippi,” she said.
In addition to public events, Pierce writes a monthly column—Poetry Break—for the Clarion-Ledger and Hattiesburg American newspapers, aimed at providing readers the tools to write poems of their own. She also developed and hosts The Mississippi Poetry Podcast, a bi-weekly interview with Mississippi poets designed for educators to use in their classrooms.
“And I’m currently working on a few new projects, including a statewide poetry-writing initiative for Mississippi students that will be launching next year,” Pierce said.
Pierce is the winner of the 2021 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award for her book “Danger Days,” a collection of poems addressing the beauty of the world, as well as destruction created by climate change. She has authored four books of poetry.
Pierce has received a 2020 Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Artist Fellowship for her poetry, a 2020 Pushcart Prize for her poem “Entreaty,” and a 2018 Pushcart Prize for her poem “I Kept Getting Books about Birds.” She also received a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Boston Review and The Southern Review, among many other publications. For more, visit http://www.catherinepiercepoet.com/.
Part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English is online at www.english.msstate.edu and the Institute for the Humanities is online at www.ih.msstate.edu. For more details about the College of Arts and Sciences visit www.cas.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.