Catherine Pierce’s fifth book of poetry, Dear Beast, is newly out from Saturnalia Books. Her memoir-in-essays, Foxes for Everybody, was published by Northwestern University Press in January 2026.

Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025. She is the author of Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. She is a three-time winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and her first book, Famous Last Words, won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

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 Sun, The Southern Review, New England Review, Pleiades, and the 2019 and 2021 Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The 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, where she runs Studio & Craft, a poetry community, and continues to write, teach, and spend as much time outside as possible.