Joy Priest won an Advancing Black Arts Award

Joy Priest, assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, has won an Advancing Black Arts Award from The Pittsburgh Foundation for her poetry anthology, “The Black Outside.” The Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh program was created and funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation to celebrate and grow the Black arts sector.

Priest received $50,000 to support her anthology, “The Black Outside,” which will focus on themes of Black ecology, the Great Migration, Black desire and Black addiction, as well as a collection of essays on Black surrealism and poetic craft. Priest, who joined Pitt in 2023, also serves as curator of community programs and praxis for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Priest’s poems and essays have appeared widely in publications such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sewanee Review and ESPN. Her writing has also been featured in anthologies, including “The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop,” “That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions,” and “What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People.” Her work has been commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.