Catherine Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025, and is 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;
Famous Last Words won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Two new books arrive in 2026: a memoir,
Foxes for Everybody, from Northwestern University Press, and a poetry collection,
Dear Beast, from Saturnalia.
At Lit Hub Pierce tagged "
five books that I would have gratefully devoured as a new mother (and did gratefully devour as a not-quite-as-new one)." One title on the list:
Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
While not solely about parenting, this book includes some of my favorite depictions of the fullness of a domestic life with children. Heating & Cooling
was my introduction to the micro-memoir, defined by Fennelly, a skilled poet, as “[a] true hybrid [that] strives to combine the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction.” Childbirth and parenting are here, alongside reflections on art, family, mortality, and romance. Sometimes a micro-memoir is no longer than a sentence, as in “Married Love, III,” which reads as follows, in its entirety: “There will come a day—let it be many years from now—when our kids realize no married couple ever needed to retreat at high noon behind their locked bedroom door to discuss taxes.” This moving, funny, compulsively readable book is perfect for new parents, and for anyone struggling to teach their attention how to return to written language.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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; Famous Last Words won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Two new books arrive in 2026: a memoir, Foxes for Everybody, from Northwestern University Press, and a poetry collection, Dear Beast, from Saturnalia.
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