Joy Priest is 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 a 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, essays, and cultural criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, The New Republic, and Sewanee Review, among others. Priest is on faculty in the University of Pittsburgh MFA in Creative Writing program and serves as the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP). Her second poetry collection, The Black Outside, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2027.