Kimberly Ann Priest

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 (Texas Review Press 2025) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021), finalist for the American Best Book Awards, with books forthcoming Unsolicited Press. Her chapbooks include The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions 2022), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press 2021) and still life (PANK 2020). 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, displacement, 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 for Bloomsbury Press. Currently, an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, Kimberly volunteers at The Telling Room and is a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy. She lives with her husband in Maine.