Joy Priest

Joy Priest is a poet from Louisville, KY. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, APR, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, and Poets & Writers, among others. Her debut collection, Horsepower (University of Pittsburgh Press) , is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter’s waywardness as aspirational. Here we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self—a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, in Kentucky—before confronting the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances in a non-linear narrative. Author Shane McCrae note that “Horsepower tells what it is to be a bridge in one’s family between racism and a love forged in defiance of racism; it tells what it is to need to both escape that role and embrace it. And, just as importantly, it tells the arrival of a powerful new poet.”