Charlotte Pence
“Growing up outside of Alabama, Birmingham was the city I knew about because of its civil rights history and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Having been founded after the Civil War, Birmingham seemed to be a place with one eye on the future and one eye on the past. That view, of course, was too simplistic for all the vibrancy of this town and its people.”
Charlotte Pence’s first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. She is also author of two award-winning chapbooks and editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Brevity. In July of 2020, her next poetry collection, Code, will be published by Black Lawrence Press. A graduate of Emerson College (MFA) and the University of Tennessee (PhD), she is now the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama. To pre-order Code, visit: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/code/