Joy Priest

Joy's Affiliations: CAAPP

Poet and scholar Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series), selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande). Her other honors include a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and the Nikki Giovanni Scholarship from the Appalachian Writers Workshop.

Priest’s poems and essays have appeared widely in publications such as The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Bitter Southerner, and ESPN; in anthologies such as The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions, and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People; and in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Priest earned her Bachelor’s in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky and her MFA in Poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Priest has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women and has taught creative writing in academic and community settings. She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and the advisory board for Lit Youngstown.