Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE鈥擬ississippi鈥檚 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 , 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鈥 proposed projects.
In collaboration with the聽, Pierce will distribute a poem prompt to all K鈥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.聽
鈥淭he 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,鈥 Pierce said.
鈥淭he 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,鈥 she added. 鈥淭he laureate fellowship is a tremendous honor, and I鈥檓 so excited about the work it鈥檚 going to let me pursue.鈥
Pierce received the 2021 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award for her book 鈥淒anger Days,鈥 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 鈥淓ntreaty,鈥 and a 2018 Pushcart Prize for her poem 鈥淚 Kept Getting Books about Birds.鈥
Pierce received a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her 2019 poem 鈥淗ow Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel鈥 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 鈥淭he Tornado Is the World鈥澛(Saturnalia, 2016), winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award and a 2015 national Sustainable Arts Foundation Award; 鈥淭he Girls of Peculiar鈥澛(Saturnalia, 2012), also a winner of the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award; and聽鈥淔amous Last Words鈥澛(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鈥檚 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聽.
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鈥 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 .
Part of 小黄书鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences, the English department is online at聽聽and on Facebook and Twitter @MSStateEnglish.
小黄书 is Mississippi鈥檚 leading university, available online at聽.