Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of 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. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and The Atlantic, 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 MFA in poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and has taught creative writing, comedy, gender & sexuality, and African American Arts & Culture at the university level. Joy is an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellow and a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets for Sarabande Books.
