Joy Priest, a scholar, writer, poet, teacher, and leader, came to Pitt in 2023. Assistant professor in the English Writing program and curator of Community Programs and Practice for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at Pitt, Priest uses her creative abilities to empower students’ self-expression In an interview with T5F, Priest talked about her journey to Pitt and her long list of endeavors, including her first full-length poetry collection, Horsepower (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), and the anthology she recently edited, Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023).
Priest grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, making her way to Pitt in 2023. Her goal was always to end up as a professor—and now, her dreams are coming true at Pitt.
“I always wanted to be at the university because, really, I’m a reader who sometimes writes,” Priest said. “I just want to be around books and talking about books.”
At Pitt, Priest is an assistant professor in the English Writing program, where she teaches students something she’s well-versed in: writing poetry. With classes available for undergraduate and graduate students alike, she hopes to help students find themselves in her classroom—similar to how she did in her undergraduate career at the University of Kentucky, starting on a completely different path than the one she’s on now.
“When I started college, I was a pre-med major,” Priest said. “What I’ve come to understand is that you’re going to be good at what you really want to do. So I hope that this is really the type of class in college where you find yourself, figure out who you are, figure out what you want to do.
In the writing classes she teachers, Priest urges her students to write about themselves. “I want you to write about you, what’s going on in your life,” Priest tells her students. She hopes that students will “confront their lives and who they are” in her class, which is at the core of poetry for Priest.
As a black woman growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, much of Priest’s writing focuses on her identity in America and her experience. Horsepower, which was part of the Pitt Poetry Series and winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, is a collection of poems exploring her life as a biracial child, and later young adult, living right outside Kentucky’s derby racetrack Churchill Downs. The earliest poems in Horsepower started taking shape during Priest’s undergraduate poetry workshop at the University of Kentucky, where she was “just writing about [her] life.”
“I was just writing what I knew,” Priest said. “My origin story just so happens to be about a place, which is a very segregated city, and my parents … a white mother, a black father. That’s just my life story, so that’s what I wrote about.” 
Though she wasn’t knowingly writing her poems for a book at the time, she was still writing about experiences that were vital to her identity. “When I sit down to write a poem,” Priest said, “the only thing I am concerned about is capturing the truth of the human experience.” This, for her, was what came out in Horsepower, which details her coming of age in a place that hardly accepted her as a black woman.
Much of Priest’s writing explores Blackness in America, whether she is rendering her own experiences or reflecting on the lives of others. In the spring of 2024, Priest earned her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston with a dissertation focusing on “the Black Outside.” To her, blackness and ecology have much to do with one another, and the conversation between these two things plays out in her thesis.
“I’m just really interested in … excavating histories in which black people have thought differently about nature and our relationship to it,” Priest said. “Ultimately, in my PhD, I decided to focus on my cultural background and practices that black people have developed that are sort of alternatives [to typical ideologies of black placement]. … I’m sort of working against ideas and saying, ‘Actually, black people have a lot to offer in how we think about our relationship to the land, to animals, and to one another.’”
Beyond her doctoral dissertation, the connection between location and identity is an important one for Priest as a member of the Affrilachian Poets Collective: a group of nonwhite poets around the Appalachian region who are defying the typical ruralized white stereotypes that are associated with the area. “It’s about saying, hey, people of color live in this region, and this is our experience,” Priest said. As someone from the Appalachian region of Kentucky, Priest sees this part of her identity as crucial to who she is and thus draws from it in her writing.
“I grew up in a space that’s just like, ‘I feel invisible,’ and so it was very important to me to [tell] people, ‘Hello, I’m here, look at what’s going on here, look at us,’” she said.
The legacy of Louisville plays out further in Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology, for which Priest curated the work of 37 Louisville poets. After riots erupted across Kentucky and the nation in 2020 as a response to the murder of Breonna Taylor by law enforcement, poets and creatives were using their media to convey their thoughts and feelings about racial injustice in Louisville. Invoking Louisville as a “city of writers,” Priest hoped to preserve the outcry of writers from this moment and create an “artifact that’s going to last beyond that moment.”
Now, Priest is continually working to “embody” her poetics. She has collaborated with other writers and visual artists to curate museum exhibits, worked with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and taught a number of community and academic poetry seminars and workshops to empower others through poetry. “It’s really important that poetry lives beyond the page,” Priest said.
Outside of her teaching at Pitt, Priest takes great pride in her role as the curator of Community Programs and Practice at Pitt's Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP). Here, she connects writers and makers at the CAAPP with communities outside of the University. Empowering black communities inside and outside of the University is crucial to the CAAPP’s mission, which provides specifically black spaces that enable shared culture where, Priest says, “you don’t have to explain things.”
Because poetry allows Priest—and many others—to express herself in ways that she can’t otherwise, she has multiple projects underway, from book plans, short story and essay collections, to play scripts. At the core of it all is her passion for writing.
“It’s just how I exist in the world, how I interact with the world,” Priest said. “I can’t ever imagine a time where I’d be like, ‘I’m done writing,’ because it would be like, ‘I’m done being.’”
—Briana Bindus
Briana Bindus, associate editor for The Fifth Floor, is a junior pursuing a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in English Literature and Communications. She believes in empowering all voices, which she aims to do through her passion for journalism.