Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship and a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and has won the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from APR, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, The Louisville Anthology, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy received her M.F.A. in poetry, with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She is an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellow and a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Joy is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets for Sarabande Books.
