Kimberly Ann Priest
She/Her/Hers
Bessey Hall
434 Farm Ln
East Lansing, MI 48824
FacultyWriting, Rhetoric, and CulturesFirst Year Writing
Assistant Professor of First-Year Writing
Affiliate Faculty Center for Gender in Global Context
Biography
Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells. She is the author of tether & lung (TRP: the university press of SHSU) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications) which was a finalist for the American Best Book Awards, with new books forthcoming from TRP and Sundress. Her chapbooks include The Optimist Shelters in Place (Small Harbor Publishing), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press) and still life (PANK). Kimberly’s writing and scholarly interests are deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, ecopoetics, ecofeminism, women’s studies, disabilities studies, classic film studies, narrative justice, arts-based research, and writing for therapeutic purposes. A 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, migration, endangered species, and rewilding, and travel and nature writing. She has received residencies from Monson Arts, SAFTA, Owsley Fork, and Proximity Writer’s House, 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 Copper Nickel, North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, RHINO, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Birmingham Poetry Review. Her work has also been selected for Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and will appear in the second edition of the textbook Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic. She is a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy.
Media Mentions
Creative Writing Alumna Talks Survival and Success
CMU News
April 14, 2025
Interview with English professor and poet Robert Fanning about my current publishing successes.
Laurel Review Author Interview
The Laurel Review
December 14, 2024
Interview with Luke Rolfes of the Laurel Review about my newest poetry book.
Announcing The Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry Winner
University of Nebraska Press blog
September 16, 2024
Announcement that my poetry book WOLVES IN SHELLS won the Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry.
Awards and Honors
Backwaters Prize in Poetry
University of Nebraska
2024
Wolves in Shells was selected as the 2024 recipient of The Backwaters Prize in Poetry, an international poetry book competition initiated by the Backwaters Press in 1998 that has produced award-winning books by some of America’s finest authors. The annual Prize builds upon an impressive backlist in poetry and creative prose that contributes to the cultural significance and preservation of diverse social groups and societies across the world. Each year one poetry manuscript is selected as an overall winner, and one poetry manuscript is selected as an honorable mention, by a committee of preliminary judges and one final judge.
Brooklyn Girls Books Prize in Poetry
Brooklyn Girl Books
2020
Featured in Women Under Scrutiny: An Anthology of Truths, Essay, Poems, Stories, and Art, “Record of Wrongs” was chosen as the winner of the Brooklyn Girls Book Prize in Poetry
Heartland Poetry Prize
New American Press
2019
Featured in the 2019 New Poetry from the Midwest Anthology, “Practice” was chosen as a winner of the Heartland Poetry Prize.
Courses
WRA 101: Writing as Inquiry
The study and practice of invention, arrangement, revision, style, and delivery to help students make successful transitions to writing, reading, and researching in higher education.
WRA 195H: Writing as Inquiry Honors
The study and practice of invention, arrangement, revision, style, and delivery to help students make successful transitions to writing, reading, and researching in higher education, specifically designed for Honors students.
IAH 231B: Themes and Issues: Moral Issues and the Arts and Humanities
Human conflict and moral dilemmas, addressed through diverse methods and materials from the arts and humanities.
Publications
Artist Statement
Portfolio

Sundress Publications
Kimberly Ann Priest’s debut collection Slaughter the One Bird is a haunting and incisive meditation on the enduring effects of childhood sexual abuse. Reflecting on the impact of trauma on her memories and role as a mother, Priest intertwines past and present in a series of lyrical confessions and meditations on power and grief. In poems addressed to the nameless “pedophile,” as well as a series of vignettes on everyday life ranging from subjects as varied as the preparation of breakfast to the migration of deer, she deconstructs the history of abuse spanning from childhood to her adult life in which she finds herself trapped in a relationship with a violent partner. Religious legalism and shame play a strong role in the power dynamics between perpetrator and victim. Vivid and moving, these poems offer a highly personal glimpse into the poet’s journey through disempowerment and grief toward healing.

Texas Review Press
Set in rural Michigan, this book embraces a level of honest sensuality and vulnerability as a heterosexual woman grapples with the needs of her own body while her closeted homosexual husband seeks solace in the animals he loves—his horses—directing the othering he feels within himself towards his wife and children. These poems probe the nature of relationships where emotional extremes are often held in tension and betrayals are not easily healed or resolved. Here, compassion and contempt face one another, asking difficult questions concerning gender, alienation, child-rearing, domestic violence, and divorce.

University of Nebraska Press
Wolves in Shells is a modern monomyth telling the story of a woman navigating homelessness, trauma, and memories as she attempts to leave a violent partner. Reflecting on her familial heritage, this survivor grapples with the way she, the women of her history, and her daughter have been conditioned to accommodate the demands of the male ego and predation. Reflective, clear-eyed, and incisive, the poems of Wolves in Shells feature O-Six, a wolf born into the rewilding territory of Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s who serves as a metaphor for women who must cope with violence and survive on their own. Drawing from Gaston Bachelard’s quote “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones,” the narrative considers how survival requires a balance of protectiveness, risk, trust, and escape.