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
Winner of the Backwaters prize in Poetry
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
"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