Joy Priest

Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Priest has received 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 have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Kenyon Review, among others, and in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). (Source)

Poems by Joy Priest

Elegy for Kentucky by Joy Priest

September 15, 2025

“I needed to see her, to make sure / she was still there. I went the same way each evening / wanting to feel something, to see / this once-immortal creature get up.” — Joy Priest