Charlotte Pence recently served as Mobile, Alabama’s inaugural Poet Laureate and a 2024 Academy of American Poets laureate fellow. Her latest book of poems, Code, which received the 2020 Book of the Year award from Alabama State Poetry Society, details not only the life cycle of birth and death, but also the means of this cycle: DNA itself. Her first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received a silver Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. Many Small Fires explores her father’s chronic homelessness while simultaneously detailing the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Harvard Review, The New York Times, Poetry, Southern Review, Slate, Brevity, and featured on The Slowdown. A graduate of Emerson College (MFA) and the University of Tennessee (PhD), she now directs the MFA program at Texas State University and lives in Austin.