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 the author of CODE (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), THE BRANCHES, THE AXE, THE MISSING (Black Lawrence Press, 2012) and the 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. 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.