Joy Priest (she/her) is a poet and scholar from Louisville, KY. She is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate 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, 2023).
Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Imprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated.
Priest received her Bachelor's in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky, her MFA in Poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston where she is an Imprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow.
Joy has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diaspora Poetry in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA Writing Program, and the Curator of Community Programs & Praxis (CCPP) at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).
Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Imprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated.
Priest received her Bachelor's in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky, her MFA in Poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston where she is an Imprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow.
Joy has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diaspora Poetry in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA Writing Program, and the Curator of Community Programs & Praxis (CCPP) at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).
