Kimberly Ann Priest

Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. 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. 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, eco-spirituality, 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, Ghost Ranch, 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, Poetry Wales, Salamander, RHINO, Chicago Quarterly Review, and The Birmingham Poetry Review. Her work has also been selected for Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and  the second edition of the textbook Environmental and Nature Writing for Bloomsbury Press. Currently, Kimberly is an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen (UK), and a guest teaching artist for The Telling Room, as well as a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Poets & Writes, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy. She lives in Maine.