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Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology
A Louisville Poets Anthology edited by Louisville native and acclaimed Horsepower author Joy Priest.
Conceived in the aftermath of city-wide protests in 2020, Once a City Said showcases the polyvocal communities of Louisville, Kentucky, a city celebrated for its bourbon, basketball, and horseracing, but long fraught with racial injustice, police corruption, and social unrest.
Priest takes the city’s narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors, and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets. What emerges is an intimate report of a city misshapen by segregation, tourism, and ruptures in the public trust. Featuring thirty-seven acclaimed and emerging poets—including Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Erin Keane, Ryan Ridge, and Hannah L. Drake— Once a City Said archives the traditions and icons, the landmarks and spirits, the portraits and memories of Derby City.
This publication is supported by individual donors who gave to the 2021 Fund for the Arts ArtsMatch campaign. Matching funds were made possible by Fund for the Arts in partnership with LG&E and KU Foundation.
Conceived in the aftermath of city-wide protests in 2020, Once a City Said showcases the polyvocal communities of Louisville, Kentucky, a city celebrated for its bourbon, basketball, and horseracing, but long fraught with racial injustice, police corruption, and social unrest.
Priest takes the city’s narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors, and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets. What emerges is an intimate report of a city misshapen by segregation, tourism, and ruptures in the public trust. Featuring thirty-seven acclaimed and emerging poets—including Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Erin Keane, Ryan Ridge, and Hannah L. Drake— Once a City Said archives the traditions and icons, the landmarks and spirits, the portraits and memories of Derby City.
This publication is supported by individual donors who gave to the 2021 Fund for the Arts ArtsMatch campaign. Matching funds were made possible by Fund for the Arts in partnership with LG&E and KU Foundation.
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
Published June 20, 2023
2 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Joy Priest
5 books25 followersJoy Priest grew up in Louisville, KY on the backside of the world’s most famous horseracing track. She is the author of HORSEPOWER, winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP, and a 2019-2020 Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Her poems and essays appear in numerous publications, including Callaloo, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, and Third Coast, and have been anthologized in Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, and Best New Poets 2014 and 2016.
Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review; the 2019 Nikki Giovanni Scholar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; the 2018 Gregory Pardlo Scholar at The Frost Place; the winner of the 2016 College Writers’ Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation; and the recipient of a 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Additionally, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the University of South Carolina, where she received her MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Women & Gender Studies and served as Senior Editor for Yemassee Journal.
Priest is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and received her B.S. in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky. She has been a reporter, a music journalist, a theater attendant, a filmmaker, and a waitress & bartender. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African-American Arts & Culture at the university level.
Her poems and essays appear in numerous publications, including Callaloo, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, and Third Coast, and have been anthologized in Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, and Best New Poets 2014 and 2016.
Priest is the winner of the 2019 Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review; the 2019 Nikki Giovanni Scholar at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; the 2018 Gregory Pardlo Scholar at The Frost Place; the winner of the 2016 College Writers’ Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation; and the recipient of a 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Additionally, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the University of South Carolina, where she received her MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Women & Gender Studies and served as Senior Editor for Yemassee Journal.
Priest is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and received her B.S. in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky. She has been a reporter, a music journalist, a theater attendant, a filmmaker, and a waitress & bartender. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African-American Arts & Culture at the university level.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 23, 2023
so so good…
the lines. the mapping. the memory. the distance. the archive. the becoming. the inheritance. phenomenal collection. superb curation.
I’ve loved these poets for years and this felt like reading them for the first time.
the lines. the mapping. the memory. the distance. the archive. the becoming. the inheritance. phenomenal collection. superb curation.
I’ve loved these poets for years and this felt like reading them for the first time.
August 3, 2024
Great insight into Louisville poets
August 1, 2023
Edited by the author of Horsepower, this compelling anthology highlights the words of 37 Louisville poets, a fantastic way to read a variety of writers in a single sitting. In the introductory essay, Priest chronicles driving from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to Houston, Texas, in June of 2020. While stopping to rest in familiar and home cities during the height of the COVID pandemic, Priest encounters protests in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In response, Priest facilitated a writing workshop via Sarabande, and many of the pieces workshopped appear throughout these pages. With the title and four section epigraphs spotlighting poem excerpts, this compassionate exploration of community and home, Kentucky history and memory, and race and resilience moved me.
from “Recent Poetry Releases to Add to Your Collections in Anticipation of The Sealey Challenge” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/new-poetry-2023/
from “Recent Poetry Releases to Add to Your Collections in Anticipation of The Sealey Challenge” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/new-poetry-2023/
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews