Joy Priest

Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Priest has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 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, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Kenyon Review, among others, and 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 and Poets & Writers, on espnW, and in The Undefeated.

Priest received her MFA in poetry with a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina, and she has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women. She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande Books, 2023).