Joy Priest

Joy's Affiliations: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (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, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.

Priest’s poems and essays have appeared widely in publications such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, Sewanee Review, 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).

She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and the Curator of Community Programs (CCPP) & Practice at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP) at Pitt.

Her forthcoming poetry collection, The Black Outside, is forthcoming from Duke UP in 2027.

Courses Taught

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

ENGWRT 0400: Introduction to Creative Writing

ENGWRT 0520: Introduction to Fiction Writing

ENGWRT 0530: Introduction to Poetry Writing

ENGWRT 1210: Poetry Workshop

GRADUATE COURSES

ENGWRT 2210: Poetry Workshop

ENGWRT 2290: Readings in Contemporary Poetry