Catherine Pierce is one of those people who overthinks for a living.

Growing up in Wilmington, Del., she listened as her parents read books to her all the time. She began to write poetry. Her parents encouraged her to continue to write poems even when they were “goofy” at some points or “angst-ridden” at others, she said.

Now, at 31, she has published two books of poetry, “Animals of Habit” (2004) and “Famous Last Words” (2008), and she teaches poetry at Mississippi State University.

She lives in Starkville with her husband, Michael Kardos, a fiction writer who works alongside her in MSU’s English department. She writes after she gets her schoolwork out of the way — at night or on weekends.

How did you end up here?

I went to college in Pennsylvania, at Susquehanna University. There I majored in English with a writing concentration, and I knew when I graduated there that I wanted to pursue my (Master of Fine Arts) in poetry, and I wasn’t sure beyond that what I wanted to do exactly.

And then I went to Ohio State to get my MFA, so I lived in Ohio for a while and got my MFA there. And while I was there I taught for the first time as part of the graduate program. I taught comp class and I got to teach a creative writing class, and I loved it. It was not something that I had done before, and it felt very natural to me and it felt like something I could do that would never be boring. Which I have found to be the case.

And so yeah, then I decided to go on for my Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, and got my Ph.D. there, for four years, in Columbia, and in my last year I went on the job market there, and the job market in the humanities, like in English, is really competitive, so your best bet is to send out a lot of applications and see where you might get lucky.

I applied to a bunch of places and got some interviews at different schools, and my husband got some interviews at different schools. … And we were incredibly lucky that we both got offered tenure track jobs at Mississippi State. So we came down here and we love it. So that’s how I ended up here.

What do your parents do?

My parents are both actually sort of involved in education but they’re not teachers. My father is the director of operations at Widener University in Chester, Pa,, and my mother is the HR director for a school district in Pennsylvania.

But I think that one thing they did was really instill a love of reading in me, from the time I was, you know, born, and they were just constantly reading to me and encouraging me when I would pick up books that were probably a little too old for me to read, but they would encourage me to read them anyway. And yeah, I think that was a huge part of it, just being in a house with books all the time.

What kinds of books did you find on the shelves?

I remember my uncle, when I was in fifth grade, giving me a copy of “Phantom of the Opera,” which I read. In retrospect, it was kind of a terrible book. It’s incredibly melodramatic and soap opera-y, but, you know, when I was in fifth grade it was an adult book and I was reading it as a kid, and there was something that I loved on two levels — one was that I loved the book itself, the story, but the other thing was that I loved the fact that I was reading it, you know? I sort of knew that it was too old for me and I felt like I was really accomplishing this great thing, you know?

In your poetry, you refer to several places in America. It seems you’ve been trying to understand America.

I don’t think it’s understandable, the country. I think there’s too many layers of complexity to really even begin to get a handle on it. …

I think a lot of it is stuff that you can’t even really put into words, little nuances of people’s behavior or the way the weather feels, you know? I mean, you can say it’s really hot in Mississippi, but it was hot in Missouri too. It’s just a different kind of hot.

And it’s the kind of thing that I think you can’t quite describe until you’ve really lived in those places. It’s not quite enough to go for, like, a day and be in the airport and think, “Oh, it’s hot here too.”

Could you compare the heat in Missouri with the heat here?

I can try. I think that one of the differences is not so much the heat but the way that one reacts to the heat.

I found that, living in Missouri, it would get very, very hot there in the summers. … I mean, it could get really humid or really hot, just like it does here, and just like here sometimes it wouldn’t even cool down at night, but that extreme heat didn’t last long enough, I think, for one’s body to really adjust to it.

It just always felt really shocking when it would happen, and then I would just spend the three weeks, or however long it lasted, just thinking, “Oh my God, it’s so hot.”

And here, I think because the heat comes earlier in the year and sort of eases you into it — and then it just sticks around — it just feels so natural. It just feels so normal. … I walk out into the heat and it’s wet. I mean, it’s humid and it’s damp and it doesn’t bother me at all.

What have you written about since moving to Starkville?

What I’m writing a lot about right now is adolescence — the ages between like 12 and 18. …

I think we kind of short-change teenagers sometimes, by thinking, oh, they don’t know. They’re young and they think everything’s a big deal but it’s not, you know.

It might, in fact, be a big deal, and there are, in fact, things that people are dealing with when they’re young that are, I think, legitimately challenging, and so I’m really interested in that tension between that awareness that being young and having everything in front of you but also wrestling with things that are maybe legitimately challenging, even if that wrestling is happening on purely an emotional level, you know, and not really connected to things that are actually happening in the world. So I’m writing a lot about that.

How did you start thinking about that?

I think that one thing is possibly just teaching and working a lot with people who are maybe coming from high school, especially teaching like a freshman class or something.

… I feel like I can remember really well what it was like to be in high school for example and I think that that comes partly from being around people a lot who have come recently from that time. But I’m not sure where it came from. I’ve just written a lot of poems about being sort of that age. …

This is not something I do as much anymore, but I remember being younger and feeling nostalgic for the moment I was in, sort of thinking, “In 10 years, how will I think about this moment?” Very sort of meta way of experiencing my life. … I remember being 16 and thinking, “OK, now I’m 16. I’m supposed to feel this and this and this,” according to movies and books and whatever. “This is the way I should be feeling now. And so do I feel that way? And will I look back on it the way movies say I will look back on it?”

How would you describe yourself?

Maybe as someone who overthinks things. (Laughs.), as I’m doing right now, trying to describe myself.

I will say that I think that I engage pretty intensely with the world around me.

How do you introduce yourself? Do you say you’re a poet?

When I tell people what I do, I never say I’m a poet. Not because I’m ashamed of it; I think that I love it. But I think it can come off as sounding kind of pretentious. I don’t want to walk into a room and say, “I’m a poet.”

I will say I’m a professor. and I think that sounds very respectable. … It’s a thing that one might understand. … It’s a job, something that you work at and can put a name to. And then if people ask what I teach, then I’ll sort of go into it. … But usually I’ll just leave it as “I’m a professor. I’m an English professor. I teach creative writing.” And I’ll sort of go from there.

Below is one Pierce’s poems originally published in “Famous Last Words” (Saturnalia, 2008)

“Love Poem to

The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.

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