Professor of English & Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Charlotte Holmes joined the faculty at Penn State in 1987. Throughout her 35 years here, she served as thesis director for over 40 MFA writing students and acted as second reader for over 25 additional MFA students. She directed scores of undergraduate honors theses and graduate BA/MA theses. A significant number of these students have gone on to publish their writing and/or teach creative writing themselves.

Holmes directed the Creative Writing Program at Penn State from 2013-2020 and served as MFA Program Director from 1994-1997, as well as Acting Director in 2003. She has won many awards for her teaching, service, and writing. From Penn State, she received the George Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Stephanie J. Pavoucek Shields Faculty Award for the Mentoring of Women, the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Advising Award, and the College of Liberal Arts Award for Outstanding Teaching by Tenure-Line Faculty.

Charlotte Holmes’s collection of short fiction, The Grass Labyrinth, published in March 2016 by BkMk Press, received both the Gold Medal for the Short Story from the Independent Publishers Association (the IPPY) and the Gold Medal for the Short Story from Foreward magazine. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, Epoch, Grand Street, Narrative, New Letters, The New Yorker, and other magazines, and her poems in American Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, The Women’s Review of Books, and other journals. Her work has been cited for excellence in the O.Henry Prize Stories anthology, Best American Stories, and Best American Essays, and anthologized in After O’Connor: Contemporary Georgia Writers and in two volumes of New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best. The recipient of a Writer’s Exchange fellowship from Poets & Writers, she has also received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, two Pennsylvania Arts Council Fellowships, the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, a travel fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Professor Holmes’ contributions and impact during her long tenure at Penn State have been monumental.

We wish her a well-earned retirement with her husband, the poet and former Penn State professor James Brasfield, on the coast of Maine.