Kimberly Ann Priest

Kimberly Ann Priest is a neurodivergent writer and the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021), finalist for the American Best Book Awards, tether & lung (Texas Review Press 2025), and Floralia (Unsolicited Press 2025); as well as the chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place (Small Harbor Press 2022), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press, 2021), and still life (PANK 2020). Her writing and scholarly interests are deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, ecofeminism, disabilities studies, classic film studies, 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, Firefly Farms, 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. Pronouns: she/her