MSU English faculty receives second prestigious Pushcart Prize
by Sam Kealhofer, Intern on the A&S Research Support Team
Mississippi State University faculty member Catherine Pierce is the recipient of a second Pushcart Prize, a prestigious literary award, for her poem “Entreaty,” originally published in 32 Poems, a magazine known for publishing winners of awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, MacArthur Genius Grant winners, and Poets Laureate.
Endowed and annually published since 1976 by Wainscott, New York-based nonprofit Pushcart Prize Fellowships Inc., the Pushcart Prize series has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as “one of the most important publishing projects in American history.”
To read “Entreaty,” visit: http://www.versedaily.org/2020/entreaty.shtml?fbclid=IwAR1kcPmyBSahhdtbexCFULzQ6q61CX4aszvqAe8GotQFhhzB--zSZySjMUg.
A native of Delaware, Pierce serves as co-director of MSU’s creative writing program and a professor in the Department of English. In 2019, she received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Pierce’s 2020 Pushcart Prize comes on the heels of the October release of her newest book, “Danger Days,” a Saturnalia Books publication that celebrates “our planet while also bearing witness to its collapse.”
Throughout “Danger Days,” Pierce contemplates her role as both a mother and writer, melting glaciers around the world, and the rise of gun violence in America. The work articulates the danger and beauty encompassed in the day-to-day of the modern era. “I’m trying to see this place even as I’m walking through it,” Pierce writes.
From the beginning of the pandemic, Pierce has been busy reflecting on issues and has had opportunities to share her thoughts with local audiences. In late October, Pierce spoke with Jan Swoope of the Columbus Dispatch to discuss the pandemic’s impact on creativity and her writing process.
Pierce said she has been busy since the start of the pandemic, finding fewer hours for writing since her children have been at home learning virtually during this time. Though she has had less time to write, Pierce said she keeps a notebook and believes it helps her to absorb and meditate on her impressions of this “strange time.”
“I like to think I’m storing things up. Writing has always been a way to process how I’m feeling about everything. I like poems that don’t offer answers. I like poems where I see the thinking on the page,” Pierce said.
Pierce also received a 2018 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “I Kept Getting Books About Birds,” which also was included in “The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses” anthology series.
She has published works of poetry in numerous literary avenues, including her 2019 piece, “How Becoming a Mother is Like Space Travel,” published in The Nation magazine, a print magazine founded in 1865 and considered the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States.
Pierce has authored three additional books of poetry. They include “The Tornado Is the World” (Saturnalia 2016), winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize and 2015 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award; “The Girls of Peculiar” (Saturnalia 2012), winner of the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize; and “Famous Last Words” (Saturnalia 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.
Her chapbook, “Animals of Habit,” was published in 2004 by Kent State University Press. Her poems also have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Slate, Boston Review and The Cincinnati Review, among many other publications. For more, visit www.catherinepierce.net.
Pierce earned a Bachelor of Arts from Susquehanna University, Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University, and doctorate from the University of Missouri.
In an effort to contribute solutions to the various challenges facing the nation, as well as insight into other points of interest, the College of Arts and Sciences will continue to highlight faculty research in our “Research in the Headlines” series each Monday and Wednesday. For more research in the headlines, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/research/researchintheheadlines/; and for information about the College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of English, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/ or https://www.english.msstate.edu/.