Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025, and is the author of five books of poems: Dear Beast (2026), Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Her memoir-in-essays, Foxes for Everybody, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2026.

Pierce’s poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, New England Review, The Sun, Pleiades, and the 2019 and 2021 Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Washington Post, Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Millions, Cincinnati Review, and River Teeth. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and in 2022 she was selected as an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellow.

Pierce earned her B.A. from Susquehanna University, her M.F.A. from the Ohio State University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri before moving to Mississippi to join the faculty at Mississippi State University. From 2007-2024, she was professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State. She recently moved with her family back to her home state of Delaware and founded Studio & Craft, an online poetry community through which she offers workshops and manuscript consultations.