Joy Priest
- Assistant Professor
- Curator of Community Programs & Praxis (CCPP) of CAAPP
Joy's Affiliations: CAAPP
Poet and scholar Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series), selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande).
Her other honors include 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.
Priest’s poems and essays have appeared widely in publications such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sewanee Review, and ESPN; in anthologies such as The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions, and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People; and in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and the Curator of Community Programs (CCPP) & Practice at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP) at Pitt.
Courses Taught
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
ENGWRT 0530: Introduction to Poetry Writing
ENGWRT 1210: Poetry Workshop
GRADUATE COURSES
ENGWRT 2210: Poetry Workshop
ENGWRT 2290: Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Education & Training
- BA, Print Journalism, University of Kentucky
- MFA, Creative Writing (Poetry), University of South Carolina
- Graduate Certificate, Women & Gender Studies, University of South Carolina
- PhD, Creative Writing & Literature, University of Houston
Representative Publications
Three Poems in the Boston Review
“From the Other Side of a Migratory Silence: On the Work of Patricia Smith” (essay)
Research Interests
Poetry & Poetics; African Diasporic Literatures & Translation; Ecopoetics; The American South; Black Counter-Humanist Philosophy
Research Grants
Pitt Momentum Funds Microgrant, 2024
National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, 2021
