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In Conversation: Nicky Beer & Catherine Pierce

September 15 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT

As poets, essayists, and teachers, both Nicky and Catherine embrace a practice of play. Far from being frivolous, or antithetical to serious and complex work, play can be an essential part of the creative process. In this conversation, Nicky and Catherine (or Katie)—longtime friends from their grad school days more than twenty years ago—will talk with each other about their own approach to play as writers and teachers, and will explore how play, through form, subject, voice, and the generative process, can help us stay nimble and engaged in our work.

Free

About Nicky

Nicky's headshot features a woman with blunt bangs, red hoop earrings, and a leopard print coat smiles at the camera. The background is black, so only her face and coat is illuminated.

Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015) and The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her third book of poems, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, was published by Milkweed Editions March 2022, and was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a MacDowell Fellowship, a fellowship and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Campbell Corner Prize. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for the journal Copper Nickel.

You can contact her at nicole.beer@ucdenver.edu, and follow her on Instagram: @nbeerpoet.

Photo Credit: Dustin Moon Visual

About Catherine

Catherine's headshot features a woman sitting on a bench outside. She is sitting on an angle from the camera and her head is turned to face the camera. She's wearing a green sweater and has shoulder-length brown hair. She is smiling.

Catherine Pierce’s fifth book of poetry, Dear Beast, is newly out from Saturnalia Books. Her memoir-in-essays, Foxes for Everybody, was published by Northwestern University Press in January 2026.

Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025. She is the author of Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. She is a three-time winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and her first book, Famous Last Words, won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

Pierce’s poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Sun, The Southern Review, New England Review, Pleiades, and the 2019 and 2021 Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Millions, Cincinnati Review, and River Teeth. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and in 2022 she was selected as an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellow.

Pierce earned her B.A. from Susquehanna University, her M.F.A. from the Ohio State University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri before moving to Mississippi to join the faculty at Mississippi State University. From 2007-2024, she was professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State. She recently moved with her family back to her home state of Delaware, where she runs Studio & Craft, a poetry community, and continues to write, teach, and spend as much time outside as possible.

Photo Credit: Becca Neufeld