Kimberly Priest

Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells as well as the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications), finalist for the American Best Book Awards. Priest’s writing and scholarly curiosity occupy a distinctive position at the intersection of documentary poetics, feminist inquiry, environmental humanities, and trauma studies while remaining fundamentally concerned with the ethical problem of how individuals construct meaning from inherited histories and received lifeworlds. Her creative scholarship is organized around a central question: How do we negotiate and transform the narratives that shape our lives? A neurodivergent survivor of gendered violence and an active outdoorswoman, she has participated in initiatives to increase awareness concerning sexual assault, survivorship, and healing through nature and artistic expression. Her literary interests include women poets and storytellers; stories that explore religious imaginations and spirituality; feminist narratives of trauma; eco-poetics, nature writing, and environmental studies; cultural inquiry through cinema, psychology, and medical humanities; and travel writing. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Monson Arts, Ghost Ranch, and SAFTA and she has served as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications and Black Earth Institute as well as an associate editor for six years with the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. Winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize and a Brooklyn Girls Books prize, her work has appeared in literary journals such as The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Chicago Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Birmingham Poetry Review, and featured in the second edition of the textbook Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology for Bloomsbury Academic. Currently, Kimberly is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures and affiliate faculty in Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen and a guest teaching artist at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine, as well as a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Poets & Writers, and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.