Contact: Aspen Harris

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi’s Poet Laureate Catherine Pierce will host the Mississippi Young Writers Poetry Festival, a culmination of her statewide K-12 poetry-writing initiative and competition My Town Mississippi Poetry Project, at Mississippi State next week.

The festival will be held April 28, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., in Colvard Student Union and invites around 100 elementary, middle and high school winners of the poetry competition to participate in writing workshops, read their poems, receive an anthology with the work of student writers and hear a keynote from Isabella Ramirez, 2022 Southern Regional Youth Poet Laureate.

For the project’s competition, all K-12 schools across the state were provided with a poem prompt and classroom resources for teachers from Pierce. Schools selected poems from each grade to be submitted to a panel of Mississippi poets who selected the statewide winners.

“We received 202 absolutely wonderful poems from students all across the state. These poems are vivid, insightful, sometimes very funny, sometimes deeply moving, and always totally individual. It was an honor to spend time with these students’ work,” said Pierce, who in addition to Poet Laureate is an MSU English professor and co-director of the university’s Creative Writing program.

The My Town Mississippi Poetry Project, launched in Fall 2022 in collaboration with the Mississippi Center for the Book, and the Mississippi Young Writers Poetry Festival are made possible by a $50,000 Academy of American Poets fellowship given to Pierce to support a public poetry initiative after being selected a Poet Laureate Fellow in the Academy.

“My goal in launching this project was to help students experience the joy and accomplishment that can come from writing poetry and from amplifying their own voices, words and experiences. I wanted the prompt—which asked students to write poems about their hometowns—to emphasize for students the importance and validity of their own lives as subject matter for poetry. Poetry is such a valuable tool in our lives—it can be a source of delight and comfort; it can be an outlet for grief; it can be a way to engage more deeply with the world around us. My hope is that these talented students will continue writing poems and exploring their own voices and creativity,” Pierce said.

Selected as the state’s Poet Laureate in 2021, Pierce has authored four books of poetry. They include “Danger Days” (Saturnalia, 2020), winner of the 2021 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award; “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.

In 2019, Pierce received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She also has 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.”

Her poems also have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Boston Review and The Southern Review, among many other publications. Pierce, a Delaware native, 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 Pierce, visit www.catherinepiercepoet.com.

Visit www.english.msstate.edu for more information about the Department of English, housed within the College of Arts and Sciences.

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