Kimberly Ann Priest

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.