Senator Stephanie Flowers

District 8

Senator Stephanie Flowers of Pine Bluff represents District 8, which includes parts of Pine Bluff and Jefferson County, as well as parts of Arkansas, Desha, Lincoln, Monroe, and Phillips Counties. 

An attorney, Senator Flowers has served as the vice-chair of the Senate Committee on Judiciary since 2019.

Senator Flowers is a member of the Senate Committee on City, County, and Local Affairs, Joint Energy Committee, the Senate Rules, Resolutions, and Memorials Committee, Joint Budget Committee, and the Arkansas Legislative Council.

She served in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 2005 to 2010, when she was elected to the Arkansas Senate.

Senator Flowers has sponsored legislation to foster community support for public schools, such as Act 1507 of 2013 to expand the ability of schools to hold events. She sponsored Act 1002 of 2011 and Act 1423 of 2013 to make parental involvement plans more user-friendly and more effective. During each session, she regularly sponsors bills to fund after-school programs, drug abuse treatment and services for juveniles in the justice system.

Many of the measures that she sponsors are appropriations that flow through the legislative process quietly, after Senator Flowers has reached a consensus with other committee members. 

The appropriations she supports fund the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Southeast Arkansas College, the Southeast Arkansas Economic Development District, the Rural Services Department, the Heritage Department, literacy programs, and senior citizens centers. 

Another of Senator Flowers’s priorities is to expand and improve re-entry training of inmates to help them better prepare for a productive life outside prison. She was been instrumental in creating a program in which probationers and parolees clear condemned properties.

In 2017, she co-sponsored a package of bills to strengthen ethics and campaign finance laws. She also co-sponsored legislation to create a monument on the state capitol grounds honoring Gold Star Families who have lost a loved one during active military service. In 2019, she co-sponsored legislation creating the major highway program and to set up a grant program for improvements at historically black colleges and universities.

In 2021, Senator Flowers co-sponsored Act 154, a tax cut for people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Their unemployment benefits will not be taxed by the state, saving them about $59 million in state income taxes.

Senator Flowers is a native of Pine Bluff and a graduate of Philander Smith College in Little Rock. She also graduated from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in Houston. She is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and has one son.