Joy Priest

Joy Priest

The festival’s opening speaker is Joy Priest (she/her) the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of 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 or are forthcoming in Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation, among others. She is an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diasporic Poetry on the faculty of Pitt's MFA program and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at its Center for African American Poetry & Poetics.