Charlene Pierce
Charlene Pierce, a native Nebraskan, is a poet, teacher, and founder of the Nebraska Poetry Society.
She champions the literary arts across Nebraska and beyond through performance, mentorship, and her years of teaching.
She has been anthologized and published in several literary journals. She was a finalist for Best of the Net 2025 and the 2024 BlackBerry Peach competition.
She is a Merit Scholar in Pacific University’s MFA program and taught in the Poetry Foundation’s Forms and Features Series.
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