Kimberly Ann Priest
Author & Educator
Books
Wolves in Shells
forthcoming October 2025
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
“Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest is a piercing rebuke of ‘our dependency on machinery/ that harms us.' That machinery is patriarchy, marriage, and gender inequality. A blistering chronicle of a life lost—children, home, health—and regained. Muriel Rukeyser asked, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.’ Each of these poems moves with the honesty of an ax.”
Tomás Q. Morín, 2024 prize judge and author of Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir
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"In the first poem, Kimberly Ann Priest evokes a moment of 'dismantled vigilance—nothing encroaching, nothing to hunt,' and this becomes the quest of these stunning poems as the speaker moves through the effects of abuse and homelessness into a world free of predation. The voice in this book is strong, astute, and vulnerable as the poet reclaims her history and its fragmented beauty alongside the story of a wolf, her totem creature. Priest writes with keen eye and great musical dexterity, creating a book that is both compelling and crucial."
Betsy Sholl, Maine poet laureate emeritus and author of As if a Song Could Save You
Winner of the Backwaters prize in Poetry
"Of wolves and shells, holy howls and spirals does Kimberly Ann Priest weave her sacred tapestry of lyrical outpouring; in one poem she writes '…because I feel like thunder often, dance like snow; because I am living.' And her poems are so fiercely alive and soaring and plunging on the page that it both hurts and fills one up to read them. Hers is a startling new voice in American poetry that can never be forgotten."
Robert Vivian, author of All I Feel Is Rivers
"Wolves in Shells is a powerful collection that details what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century. In it, Kimberly Ann Priest documents a life of resilience after homelessness, abuse, intergenerational trauma, and witnessing the violence of America. Drawing from her cross-country travels and emotional connections to wildlife—particularly the wolves of Yellowstone National Park—Priest illustrates, in captivating detail, the strength of an individual woman who is both hunted and too often harmed, but who ultimately 'become[s] her own pack' to 'survive'.”
Sunni Brown Wilkinson, winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize for Rodeo
tether & lung
TRP: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF SHSU
"Like the finest impressionist paintings, these poems’ medium of linguistic light and shadow render the many nuances of a heartfelt and hard-won life, testament to the joys and sorrows of womanhood, motherhood, and marriage. Like the most compelling collections, this book elucidates our understanding of struggles and hopes with utterly unique and surprising tropes."
Richard Blanco, fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of Homeland of my Body
"With horse (gelding) as totem creature and knife (for the cutting of flowers and food) as totem object, tether and lung moves deftly and with sustained lyric intelligence through a bucolic world in breakdown. Lives, many lives, are at stake in these poems presented with an unresolved and mesmerizingly nuanced clarity that is human and true."
Dennis Hinrichsen, author of Dominion + Selected Poems
Slaughter
the One Bird
SUNDRESS PUBLICATIONS
"Priest’s poems do the hard work of expanding the language for exploring the experience of abuse and trauma, which means they expand our understanding of (in)humanity. These poems are never predictable. They are like flashes of light in shadowed rooms—dark rooms—with bright, illuminating flashes."
Sue William Silverman, author of If the Girl Never Learns
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"These are powerful, courageous poems that are needed in the world—they give voice to the voiceless and they make space for the vulnerable, ultimately showing us the strength to make it through. Slaughter the One Bird is a remarkable collection that reminded me of the incredible power of women poets and well-written poems."
Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides
Chapbooks
The Optimist
Shelters in Place
HARBOR EDITIONS
"Through the lens of collective tragedy and the lived experience of a woman alone, these neo-confessional poems balance the ache of imagining families 'sobbing' in hospital parking lots with the personal loss of long isolation, the fresh finality of divorce, and even the tedious need to clean the shower."
Lisa Fay Coutley, author of tether
still life
PANK BOOKS
"Hold tight, this collection will take you on a journey, as it leans into the underbelly of 'where the smoke becomes insightful',"
Kelly Grace Thomas, author of Boat Burned
Parrot Flower
GLASS POETRY PRESS
"Like the eponymous flowers, the poems in Parrot Flower oscillate, beautifully, between the familiar and strange, between the therapeutic and poisonous. It's unsettling and cinematic, as if, on the other side of these pages, someone was holding a showing of Hiroshima Mon Amour."
Sam Cha, author of The Yellow Book