Virtual Poetry Reading with Joy Priest (Working Writers Series at College of the Holy Cross)

The Working Writers Series at College of the Holy Cross is presenting a virtual poetry reading by Joy Priest. Registration is needed to join the event. Visit the Zoom registration link and fill in the form. A meeting link will be e-mailed to you.

Register

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, judged by Natasha Trethewey. Horsepower is designed as a radical Bildungsroman in poetic form, tracing a young Black girl’s attempts to escape from the influences of both her white supremacist grandfather and the bitterly segregated urban South where she grew up. Priest has received many awards and fellowships, most recently the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Prize. She has published poems in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, APR, The Atlantic, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, and other places. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop; The Louisville Anthology; A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South; and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. Priest has been a journalist, theater attendant, waitress, and fast-food worker in Kentucky, and has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and is now pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, with a background in postcolonial studies, Black, Latinx, and Native poetics, and feminist theory.