In this presentation designed for young people (adaptable for grades K-12), Catherine Pierce will discuss some of the key building blocks of poetry, share engaging and accessible poems by a range of poets, and lead participants through a writing activity. Participants will leave the presentation with a poem of their own and a fuller understanding of what poetry can be.
Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020); The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. Each of her most recent three books won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. Pierce’s poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, and the 2019 and 2021 Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Millions, Cincinnati Review, and River Teeth. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and two Mississippi Arts Commission Artist Fellowships. Pierce lives in Starkville, where she is professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.