Book Launch and Poetry Reading with Joy Priest

Join the Humanities Center as we celebrate the release of Joy Priest's newest book, The Black Outside.

The Black Outside is an ensemble of poems that archives personal and ancestral memory, contextualizing loss and longing in a world created by transatlantic slavery. In these poems, Black ecology is lived and thought across a range of sites, from the “interior gardens” to “grief’s aquatic caves.” At these sites, Priest’s speaker steps through a hole in the fabric of Western reality, a portal to a world outside, a surreal elsewhere. Here, she encounters musicians, philosophers, revolutionaries, and lovers who offer methods of escape and relation with nonhuman life. In an anti-pastoral gesture, Priest tarries around the landscape, refusing to look away and reflecting on her place in larger histories that have inaugurated our changing climate. In doing so, she invites us to understand loneliness as a communal experience, to emancipate ourselves from isolation.

Poet and scholar Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series), selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande). Her other honors include a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.

This event will be both in-person in CL 602 and on zoom.

Books will be available for purchase.