Charlene Pierce
Charlene loves everything poetry—reading it, writing it, and creating spaces for others to do the same.
A 2025 Pushcart Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist, she has been anthologized in Misbehaving Nebraskans, Until There Are No Words Left, and more. Other publishing credits include, the Poetry Foundation, The Good Life Review, 805 Lit + Art, Whale Road Review, and others.
A Merit Scholar in Pacific University’s MFA program and a former Poetry Foundation Forms & Features instructor, she founded the Nebraska Poetry Society in 2020 to improve accessibility, equity, and community in the literary arts.
Her work is rooted in justice, restoration, and the belief that poetry can help us return to ourselves and to one another.
Photo Credit: Omaha PhotoWorx
Writing Workshops & Craft Talks
Forms & Features with the Poetry Foundation
How close can a reader feel to the speaker in a poem—and what shifts when that distance changes? In this generative workshop, we’ll play with psychic distance—the emotional and cognitive proximity between speaker and reader—as a way to create intimacy, detachment, tension, and revelation.
Nebraska Writers Guild Conference
Infuse your prose with fresh energy and vivid imagery. Through hands-on exercises, we'll write sentences that captivate, build tension, and use language in unexpected ways to create deeper emotional impact. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, this workshop will give you tools to enhance the beauty and power of your writing.
Vermillion Writing & Literature Conference
A craft talk about how poets shape the distance between speaker and reader through syntax, enjambment, repetition, and imagery—craft choices that allow them to write not only toward resistance and witness but also toward intimacy, healing, and transformation.
"My writing greatly improved after taking Charlene's "Using Poetry to Improve Your Writing" workshop.
It's not the type of class I would normally take, since I write romance, but really glad I did."
A student who stopped me in Panera to thank me
Reviews
The workshops Charlene teaches at the Nebraska Writers Guild conference are always highly reviewed.
Brandy, Treasurer of the Nebraska Writers Guild
“Charlene has a way of describing poetry techniques that makes it easily accessible. The examples she uses and the exercises she provides are easy to adopt in my writing."
Mary, workshop participant