Joy Priest
Photo courtesy of Joy Priest
Bio
Joy Priest is a poet and essayist from Louisville, Kentucky, whose work thus far has focused on Black adolescence in the American South. Her first collection, Horsepower, was published by Pitt Poetry Series and won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the winner of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from the Southeast Review. Her writing has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Atlantic, Bitter Southerner, ESPN, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She has received support from the Frost Place, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She received her MFA with a certificate in women and gender studies from the University of South Carolina and is currently a doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston.
This year, when my debut collection of poems, Horsepower,entered into the world, it was the 125th day of protests in my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky, which informs the image reservoir of the book. Since then, a question I’ve continued to get is, what does it mean for your debut to come out in the context of this unprecedented uprising in Louisville and across the country? For me as a Black Louisvillian, in particular, it means that the suspicions and diagnoses I made in the book, about the socioeconomic circumstances and harsh racial segregation of my city, is affirmed by the voices of my community. We are saying something together. My voice is just one voice in the choir, sometimes a contralto solo.
Shortly after the book hit my hometown indie bookstore, my high school English teacher sent me a photo: a line of officers between him and the store’s front door when he went to purchase my book. A little while later, he sent me a picture of the book in the company of the protestors on the street.
To win this award in this moment, during this year, as we mourn and sing and dance together, collectively in the streets, or isolated alone in our homes or in our cells, convinces me: I am an American poet (and I’m incredibly grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for this recognition); that my community must continue to inform the truth in my writing; that—as one of my teachers reminded me yesterday, citing Eve Sedgwick—one way we might look at joy is as proof of the existence of a truth; that truth is beauty; and that this is where my commitment lies, as I go out in search of the beautiful things and bring them back to the people in my own low register.