SUNY Canton Virtual Living Writers Series to Host Award-Winning Poet Joy Priest
The SUNY Canton Virtual Living Writers Series will close out the fall semester with a guest poet who is a recipient of one of the most prestigious awards of the genre.
Joy Priest will discuss her writing at 6:30 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, Nov. 17, via Zoom, followed by a question-and-answer session. Her debut collection, “Horsepower,” was selected in 2019 by then-U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to receive the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.
Set in the political landscape of heavily segregated Louisville, Ky., the book’s speaker—a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather—lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South.
“Undergirding these poems is a restless, resilient spirit: an urgent grappling with the desire to both remember and outrun the past, with history both personal and communal, and the complexities of American racism in its most intimate manifestation—familial love,” Tretheway said.
Priest is also the winner of the Stanley Kunitz Poetry Prize, and her work has been featured in The Undefeated, ESPN, The Atlantic, The Bitter Southerner, and Gulf Coast.
The event is free and open to the public. Participants can find the meeting ID and passcode information on the Living Writers Series webpage.
The Virtual Living Writers Series resumes in 2022 with writer Thomas Lynch March 2.
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