Joy Priest grew up in Louisville, KY on the backside of the world’s most famous horseracing track. She is the author of HORSEPOWER, winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP, and a 2019-2020 Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Her poems and essays appear in numerous publications, including Callaloo, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, and Third Coast, and have been anthologized in Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, and Best New Poets 2014 and 2016.

Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review; the 2019 Nikki Giovanni Scholar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; the 2018 Gregory Pardlo Scholar at The Frost Place; the winner of the 2016 College Writers’ Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation; and the recipient of a 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Additionally, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the University of South Carolina, where she received her MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Women & Gender Studies and served as Senior Editor for Yemassee Journal.

Priest is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and received her B.S. in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky. She has been a reporter, a music journalist, a theater attendant, a filmmaker, and a waitress & bartender. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African-American Arts & Culture at the university level.

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Joy Priest

Joy Priest grew up in Louisville, KY on the backside of the world’s most famous horseracing track. She is the author of HORSEPOWER, winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP, and a 2019-2020 Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems and essays appear in numerous publications, including Callaloo, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, and Third Coast, and have been anthologized in Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, and Best New Poets 2014 and 2016. Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review; the 2019 Nikki Giovanni Scholar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; the 2018 Gregory Pardlo Scholar at The Frost Place; the winner of the 2016 College Writers’ Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation; and the recipient of a 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Additionally, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the University of South Carolina, where she received her MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Women & Gender Studies and served as Senior Editor for Yemassee Journal. Priest is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and received her B.S. in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky. She has been a reporter, a music journalist, a theater attendant, a filmmaker, and a waitress & bartender. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African-American Arts & Culture at the university level.

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