Kimberly Ann Priest
Author & Educator

Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press), Floralia (Unsolicited Press), and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications), finalist for the American Best Book Awards, as well as the chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions), still life (PANK), and Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press). 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. 

 

Hailing from a blue-collar world in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Kimberly earned her BA (Regent University) and MA (Central Michigan University) degrees in English Language & Literature and her MFA (New England College) in Poetry/Nonfiction mid-life while raising two children to young adulthood. She is the great-granddaughter of Scottish immigrants and miners on her father's side, and the granddaughter of a traveling preacher on her mother's side. Her family history is a well-spring of Biblical lore and MacGregor clan legends, equally fraught with displacement, religious abuses, and troubled attachments. 

 

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, migration, 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: A Writer's Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic.

 

Currently, Kimberly is an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University and a volunteer teaching artist for young writers at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine. She is a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy, and she lives, with her husband, in Maine.