This week on the Sewanee Review Podcast, managing editor and poetry editor Eric Smith is joined by Joy Priest, who came to Sewanee in 2023 as a lecturer for the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.
“Writing stories is a way to control a world,” says Priest, “one that you invent.” In this conversation, she wrestles with art-making as it is related to self-conception, the ways in which governing bodies—the academy, the household, the marketplace—might nurture, or potentially thwart, the ambition of a young artist. With a focus on her debut, Horsepower, Priest and Smith discuss the pleasures and perils of curation, modes of retelling Greek myths, and the symmetry of the written line in verse.
Joy Priest is a poet and scholar from Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Horsepower and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology. She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American/African Diaspora Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Her essay “From the Other Side of a Migratory Silence: On the Work of Patricia Smith” appears in our Spring 2024 issue.
The Sewanee Review Podcast is recorded in the Ralston Listening Room at the University of the South. This episode is produced by Luke Gair and edited by ProPodcast Solutions with music by Annie Bowers. Don’t miss any of our conversations with some of today’s best writers. Subscribe to the Sewanee Review Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.