Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE—Mississippi’s Poet Laureate Catherine Pierce adds another accolade to her distinguished list of honors this month with her selection as a Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets, one of only 22 recipients this year.

Also a Mississippi State English professor, Pierce will use the fellowship support to launch a statewide poetry-writing initiative for young people, culminating in a Mississippi Young Writers Poetry Festival hosted at the university in April 2023.

The academy is contributing $1.1 million to Poet Laureate Fellows, who each receive $50,000 to support their respective public poetry projects. Additionally, the academy provides a total of $72,200 to eight local 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that have agreed to support the fellows’ proposed projects.

In collaboration with the Mississippi Center for the Book, Pierce will distribute a poem prompt to all K–12 schools across the state, along with resources to help teachers incorporate the prompt into classes. Schools will select poems from each grade and submit them to a panel of Mississippi poets selecting the statewide winners.

All school-level winners will be invited to the Mississippi Young Writers Poetry Festival, which will include a reading by each student, writing workshops, a keynote address by a poet, and an anthology given to each attendee featuring the work of student writers. 

“The belief that poetry is for everyone is at the heart of my work in this role, and one of my key goals is to find ways to help young people across Mississippi access poetry in ways that are meaningful for them,” Pierce said.

“The statewide poetry-writing initiative and Mississippi Young Writers Poetry Festival will bring poetry and its pleasures into the daily lives of Mississippi students in concrete ways,” she added. “The laureate fellowship is a tremendous honor, and I’m so excited about the work it’s going to let me pursue.”

Pierce received the 2021 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award for her book “Danger Days,” a 2020 Saturnalia Books publication. She won 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.”

Pierce received a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her 2019 poem “How Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel” was published in The Nation magazine, considered the oldest continuously printed weekly magazine in the U.S.

Pierce has authored three additional books of poetry. They include “The Tornado Is the World” (Saturnalia, 2016), winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award and a 2015 national Sustainable Arts Foundation Award; “The Girls of Peculiar” (Saturnalia, 2012), also a winner of the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award; and “Famous Last Words” (Saturnalia, 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

Her poems also have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Slate, Boston Review and The Cincinnati Review, among others.

A native of Delaware, Pierce earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna University, Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University, and doctoral degree from the University of Missouri.

For more about her work, visit www.catherinepierce.net.

Through its Poets Laureate Fellowship program, the Academy of American Poets has become the largest financial supporter of poets in the nation, awarding a total of $4.35 million in fellowships to 81 poets laureate since 2019, plus more than $250,000 to local 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that have supported poets’ projects. In addition to helping poets reach tens of thousands of individuals in 73 different communities with creative and timely poetry programs, the academy has helped encourage more than 30 communities across the U.S. to create new poet laureate positions since launching its program in 2019. For more, visit https://poets.org/announcing-2022-poet-laureate-fellows?fbclid=IwAR1KQaHj-bT09NUBAPYd9CBzNCsRup7Jd-7NybRRY83zZaM5YUn4kLsICiw.

Part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the English department is online at www.english.msstate.edu and on Facebook and Twitter @MSStateEnglish.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.