Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025. She is the author of five books of poems, most recently Dear Beast (Saturnalia, 2026), as well as of the memoir-in-essays Foxes for Everybody: Twenty-Four Hours of Early Motherhood (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere, and has won two Pushcart Prizes. From 2007-2024, she was professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Mississippi Arts Commission, Pierce now lives with her family in her home state of Delaware and runs Studio & Craft, an online poetry community.