Faculty Profiles

Charlotte Pence recently served as Mobile, Alabama’s inaugural Poet Laureate and a 2024 Academy of American Poets laureate fellow. Her most recent book of poems, Code, received the 2020 Book of the Year award from ASPS and was shortlisted for Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020 by Foreword Reviews. Her first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received a silver INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Brevity, Harvard Review, Poetry, Slate, Southern Review, The New York Times, and featured on The Slowdown. She has been a recent fellow at MacDowell, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vanderbilt’s James Patterson residency. A graduate of Emerson College (MFA) and the University of Tennessee (PhD), she is the new MFA director at Texas State University.

Ph.D. in English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006-2011
Dissertation: This We Call Many Things: A Collection of Poems
Committee: Marilyn Kallet (director), Arthur Smith, Amy Billone

M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Emerson College, Boston, 1996-1998
Thesis: Folding and Faulting: A Collection of Poems
Committee: Gail Mazur (director), John Skoyles, David Daniel
Graduate Dean’s Award for Best Thesis

B.A. in College Scholars, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1992-1996
Honors interdisciplinary program with focus on English, Latin American Literature, and International Relations