Charlotte Pence

Charlotte Pence received her MFA from Emerson College and PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Pence is the author of Code (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), which received the 2020 Book of the Year Award from the Alabama State Poetry Society and was short-listed for Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020 by Foreword Reviews; Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), which received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews; and two award-winning poetry chapbooks. She is also the editor of the academic essay collection The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). 

The director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama, she serves as the inaugural poet laureate of Mobile, Alabama. In 2024, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.