Author Biography

Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky across the street from the world's most famous horse racing track. She is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series and The Atlantic, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, and ESPN. Priest received her MFA in poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina.V. Joshua Adams is the author of a chapbook, ColdAffections (Plan B Press, 2018). Work of his has appeared or is forthcoming inBennington Review, Posit, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, andelsewhere. A former editor of Chicago Review, as well as a translator andcritic, he teaches literature and writing at the University of Louisville.makalani bandele is a Louisville native andAffrilachian Poet. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation,Millay Colony, Kentucky Arts Council, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently acandidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky,bandele's work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literaryjournals. The author of hellfightin' and under the aegis of a winged mind,awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, poems from under the aegishave been published in Prairie Schooner, 32poems, and North American Review.Mackenzie Berry .Steve Cambronpoetry has appeared inLiterary Leo, Word Hotel and Heartland Trail Review and have one two GreenRiver Writers awards. His poetry was choreographed and featured in theLouisville Ballet's 2018 Choreographer's Showcase. He is the creator and hostof Flying Out Loud, a monthly reading series featuring some of Louisville'sfinest writers and poets. He is currently working on an MFA at the EasternKentucky University Bluegrass Writer's Studio.Jeremy Michael Clark's poems have appeared in WestBranch, Poetry Northwest, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He holds degrees fromthe University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice andRutgers University-Newark, where he received his MFA. Born and raised inLouisville, Kentucky, he is a licensed social worker living in Brooklyn.Bernard Clay Bernard received an MFA in creative writing from the University of KentuckyCreative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective.His work has been published in various journals and anthologies. He currentlyresides on a farm in eastern Kentucky with his wife Lauren. English Lit is hisfirst book.Darcy Cleaver, teacher, poet, and playwright, livesin Louisville, Kentucky with her wife and four dogs. Darcy moved away in the'80s to pursue the gay agenda; she was overjoyed to return years later to amuch more inclusive city.Ron Davis is a poet and visual artist whose narrativeworks range from social commentary to afrofuturism, often intertwining thesocietal with the speculative. a louisville native, he now resides inlexington, ky with his partner Crystal Wilkinson.A native of Louisville's WestEnd, Mitchell L. H. Douglas bet\, winner of thePersea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and Cooling Board: ALong-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awardnominee. He is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowin poetry, a Cave Canem alum, and Associate Professor of English at IndianaUniversity-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).Hannah Drake , highlighting her work and the (Un)KnownProject that seeks to recognize the known and unknown names of Black peoplethat were enslaved in Kentucky and throughout the nation.Jessica Farquhar is the author of Dear MotorcycleEnthusiast, a chapbook published by The Magnificent Field in 2020. She holds anMFA from Purdue, where she was the assistant director of Creative Writing. Youcan find her work in recent issues of Can We Have Our Ball Back? and BearReview.Isiah Fish is a queer poet & performer fromLouisville, Kentucky. He holds an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois UniversityCarbondale where he worked as an editor for Crab Orchard Review. His work hasbeen published in Albion Review, Blood Orange Review, Foglifter, & MiracleMonocle.Robin Garner is a spoken word artist, published poet,host & keynote speaker. She utilizes her passion for poetry & spokenword to uplift, encourage and ignite her audience. Inspired by own adversitiesand triumphs, she is best known for her raw, transparent and uncensorednarrative in regards to women and their struggle with loving, living andmaintaining their own identity.Martha Greenwald , a projectencouraging Kentuckians to write about loved ones lost to Covid-19. She is thewinner of the 2020 Yeats Prize for Poetry. Her first collection of poetry,Other Prohibited Items, was the winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Series.Her work has appeared in such journals as New World Writing, The Threepenny Review,Slate, Poetry, The Sewanee Review and Best New Poets. She has held a WallaceStegner Fellowship at Stanford and been awarded fellowships from the NorthCarolina and Kentucky Arts Councils, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writer'sConferences, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. She taught as an adjunctprofessor for eighteen years at the University of Louisville.David Haydon is a poet and essayist originally fromSpringfield, KY. David is currently a Ph.D. student at the University ofSouthern California, studying nonfiction. David's work explores Southernqueerness, maternity, and significations of the body.David Higdon is a writer from Kentucky. His work hasbeen published or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, Lucky Jefferson, CoffinBell Journal, Naugatuck River Review, and the tiny journal. He is the 2021winner of The Grand Prix Prize from the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He liveswith his family in Louisville, Ky.John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed,2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems appearin Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best AmericanPoetry, and elsewhere. Raised in Louisville, he is pursuing a PhD in English atthe University of California, Berkeley.
Erin Keane and is on the faculty ofSpalding University's School of Creative and Professional Writing. She lives inLouisville.Anna Leigh Knowles.Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books of poems,including My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-four, editor's choice forthe Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Hush Sessions, editor's choice for the SaturnaliaBooks Poetry Prize; and Re-, finalist for the National Poetry Series. She's anassociate professor of English at the University of Louisville.Kentucky poet, folklorist, and educator SarahMcCartt-Jackson's work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Indiana Review,Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, Tidal Basin Review, TheLouisville Review, and others. She is the recipient of an Al Smith IndividualArtist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and has served asartist-in-residence for four National Parks: Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia,Catoctin Mountain National Park, and Homestead. She is the author of Stonelight(Airlie Press), which won the Phillip H. McMath Award, Weatherford Award in Poetry,and Airlie Prize. Her chapbooks include Calf Canyon (selected for publicationby Louisville poet Kiki Petrosino), Vein of Stone, and Children Born on theWrong Side of the River. She is an elementary school teacher in JeffersonCounty.Erin L. McCoy holds an MFA in creative writing and anMA in Hispanic studies from the University of Washington. Her work has appearedin the "Best New Poets" anthology twice, selected by Natalie Diaz andKaveh Akbar. She won second place in the 20192020 Rougarou Poetry Contest,judged by CAConrad, and is currently a finalist for the Missouri Review's 2021Miller Audio Prize. Her poetry and fiction have been published or areforthcoming in West Branch, Narrative, Bennington Review, Conjunctions,Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Nimrod International Journal, and other publications. She isfrom Louisville, Kentucky. Her website is erinlmccoy.com.Glenna Meeks is an emerging poet and filmmaker fromLouisville, Kentucky. She lives in NYC and comes back to Louisville yearly. Herpoems have been published in The London Reader and Taunt Magazine. She iswriting a memoir about the people and places that have made her.Sunshine Meyers is a self-professed Louisvillenative, speech-language pathologist, artist, and closet poet. While these titlesmay seem disparate, they each convey her primary passions of communication andself-expression. As a bisexual woman and survivor of long-term abuse with PTSD,Sunshine aims to use her poetry to embolden the voice of others who are all tooused to living in silence.Marta Miranda-Straub (ShadelandhouseModern Press 2019). Until the age of twelve Marta was raised in Pinar del Rio,Cuba. Marta now lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, and she describesherself affectionately as aCubalachian-acombination of Cuban andAppalachian. She was inducted into the Affrilachian Poets by Frank X Walker in2009. For many years she was the director of the Center for Women &Families in Louisville. Marta is a queer Latinx woman who lives and works atthe intersection of identities, ethnicity, race, gender, andsexualities-applying an intersectional feminist lens to all she does. She hasover forty years of experience in organizational and clinical social workpractice, during which she has held multiple roles, including professor, socialresearcher, author, psychotherapist, executive leader, fundraisingprofessional, community organizer, advocate/activist, executive coach,facilitator, trainer, and public speaker. Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Surrender, apoetry chapbook, Lost Girls, a short story collection, and Abide, a poetrychapbook forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. Her poetry has appeared in TheClackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among otherjournals. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and wasa finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize.Lance G. Newman is a 'Renaissance Man' who wearsseveral hats; the writer, the poet, the actor, the playwright, the artist, theteacher and the student. He is affectionately refer to as 'Mr. SpreadLove,' andfor the past twenty years, he's been trying to put the l-o-v-e in Louisville.Nguyn V Ngc Uyn is a Vietnamese-American immigrant, a social workerand a therapist. She lives in South Louisville with her husband and their twocats and two dogs.The work of Robert L. Penick has appeared in TheLouisville Review, The Pikeville Review, Kudzu, Literary LEO and Trajectorywithin Kentucky, and journals like The Hudson Review, North American Review andPlainsongs without. More of his work can be found at theartofmercy.netJoy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt PoetrySeries, 2020), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry byU.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She is the recipient of a 2021 NationalEndowment for the Arts fellowship and the 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Centerfellowship, and the winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from theAmerican Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerouspublications, including the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, TheAtlantic, and Kenyon Review among others, as well as in commissions for theMuseum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art(LACMA). Joy is currently an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow and doctoralstudent in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.Ryan Ridge was born and raised in Louisville,Kentucky. He is the author of four chapbooks as well as five books, including*New Bad News* (Sarabande Books 2020). His writing has appeared in AmericanBook Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Post Road, Salt Hill,Santa Monica Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. An assistant professor atWeber State University in Ogden, Utah, he codirects the Creative WritingProgram. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literarymagazine Juked, and lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer. Heplays bass in the Snarlin' Yarns.Alex Shull is a long time Louisvillian, lifelong poetand software developer by trade.Rheonna Nicole is a poet, artist, spoken wordcompetitor and entrepreneur. A native Louisvillian, she graduated from ValleyHigh School and studied commercial arts at Murray State University. Rheonna hasbeen a featured speaker at The National Council of Negro Women's Martin LutherKing Jr. brunch, Girls IdeaFest, World Festival, Kentucky Women's WritersConference, Louisville Literary Arts reading series and Indiana UniversityPoetry Festival. She has been featured in Today's Woman Magazine, Leo Weekly,Insider Louisville, Courier Journal, and Spalding University's Art &Literary Hotel. In 2016 she competed in the Women of the World Poetry Slam,ranking sixth place amongst 96 other female spoken word artists in the nation.Now a published poet, she has created her own organization called Lipstick WarsPoetry Slam (a partnership with ArtsReach of the Kentucky Center for the Arts),an all-woman poetry slam competition where she offers a platform for poets tospeak out against the injustices and celebrations of womanhood.Aileen Tierney is currently based in Louisville,Kentucky. She holds a BA in English from the University of Kentucky.Alissa Vance is a community activist, poet, andwriter, born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. In her daily life, Alissafights for housing and racial equity, freedom and liberty for all people, andjustice still for Travis Nagdy and Breonna Taylor.Ken Walker is the author of Twenty Glasses of Water(Diez, 2014) and Antworten (Greying Ghost, 2017). His work can be found inBoston Review, Hyperallergic, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail,The Seattle Review, Atlas Review, Lumberyard, Tammy, and many otherpublications.Jasmine Wigginton is a youth worker and a writer fromLouisville, Kentucky, and is currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. Throughher writing, she explores intergenerational trauma, her ancestors, and theinherent magic of being Black and from Kentucky.

Table of Contents

In the Shadow of the Spires: AForeward
Traditions &Icons
Bop: Ohio River/River City
Jean Rabin GivesAfrica The Bird
Directions to Colonel Sanders' Grave
Ghost Signs, Flea Market
Ceremonial for The World Dainty Championship
My City Sawthe First Black Athlete Millionaire, Jockey Isaac Murphy, and Afterward theWinning Jockeys Were White
Louisville is Also the #1 Producer of DiscoBalls in the World (Home to the Last Disco Ball Maker)
Hot Brown
Derby
Dennis Cooper Racing Stables
Our Derby
An Ode toSouth Louisville
Westend New Year
Replaced

Place & Protest
WeWere Here
In Which an Entrepreneur is the Mayor
State of Denial
Denialis a Cliff We Are Driven Over
witch-auk & me stop over in myhometown
The Reckoning
Community
Battleground State, or In an interview with DawnGee, Mayor Greg Fischer says his hands are tied regarding the murder of BreonnaTaylor
On Finding a Crisp Apple in Louisville's West End
AlGreen Was a Preacher
Rubbertown
Recycling Neighborhoods
IroquoisPark
My South End
Neighbors
As Preston Street Moves South to Highway
eastbroadway, or on catching TARC (transit authority of river city) uptown

Spirit& Song
fleur-de-lis
AfterEveryone Is Gone
The Past Doesn't Burst into Song Like It UsedTo
Drunk and Longing in Louisville
NEW MOON TO-DO LIST, OR,I LEFT MY BEST SEASON IN LOUISVILLE
STEAD
February 15th
Ceramic Jesus
Winning Colors, 1988
Midnightat the Quarterpole Bar and Lounge
One Year Sober
Southern Drawl
I Will Tell You What Joy Is
For Hamza "Travis" Nagdy
TheWay Out Is the Way Through
from STROLL
from STROLL

Portrait& Memory
Frail
Where There is Smoke
Ode to Kentucky
Sport of Kings
Whenthe Wind Came
Abecedarian for Alzheimer's
Heritage
GrowingHands
Kentucky,September
YearsI've Slept Right Through
The Milk Hours
Off Dwight Road
DoubleAortic Arch
Autobiography
When My Sister Told Me to Let Her Alone
Roses In the Eyes,Oblivious To The Thorns
BUCK-SHOT
Owensboro, Kentucky, LateLast June

Review

Book Riot, "Reflecting on Spring's Poetry"
Book Riot, "Recent Poetry Releases to Add to Your Collections in Anticipation of the Sealey Challenge"Still: The Journal, "Books in Brief: Summer 2023"

"An atmospheric sense of place emerges through the collection's distinct voices and perspectives....While 'Derby City' is mostly known for its horse racing (as well as bourbon and basketball), it is also a meeting place of language and history. As Priest writes in her foreword, the anthology aims at 'recover[ing] those poetic histories and communities in the poems that follow on Louisville's collective traditions and icons, places and protests, spirits and songs, portraits and memories.' It more than succeeds."—Publishers Weekly

"This compassionate exploration of community and home, Kentucky history and memory, and race and resilience moved me."—Connie Pan for Book Riot, "Recent Poetry Releases to Add to Your Collections in Anticipation of the Sealey Challenge"

"Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology is a sweeping rebuke of a city turned talking point in which more than three dozen poets seek to disrupt outside perceptions of Louisville. . . . At its core, Once a City Said is a deliberate act of resistance, an insistence that outsiders make space for the lived experiences of those who call Louisville home, a vital reminder of the power inherent in refusing to relinquish our collective voices despite all efforts to silence us."—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

"'A city can't run from itself.. try it & see how far you get.' True enough, poet Erin Keane. But can anyone pin a city down? Can someone bring in three-dozen voices that limn Louisville's limits as precisely but in more dimensions as all the 'You Are Entering' signs around its perimeter? Joy Priest accepted the challenge, editing the new anthology Once a City Said. Among her own contributions is a barefaced and bitter contemplation of the racial divide between her father and her grandfather. In themed sections, the book considers the convoluted history of evolving neighborhoods and neighbors, the pleasures and confoundedness of local culture and traditions."—T.E. Lyons, LEO Weekly

"Sometimes hidden, always remarkable, this is the story of Louisville."—Carmichael's Bookstore
"Once ACity Said is notonly overflowing with brilliance and beauty in terms of language,world-crafting, and a harmonious collision of voices, but it is also a workoverflowing with generosity. To offer a reader the breadth of talent that aplace can hold is to allow a reader to restructure that place in their ownworld. This is a mighty collection of work that I believe will endure forgenerations."—HanifAbdurraqib, New York Times-bestsellingauthor of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes toA Tribe Called Quest                                                     "Louisvillerepresent! I'm excited to see that Joy Priest has compiled a textured range ofcontemporary River City voices that capture the traditions, protests, memories,and spirit that is uniquely Louisville. This anthology is an engaging read thatspans voices, styles, and experiences. A wonderful accomplishment that saysonce and for all that Louisville has its own dazzling slice of Kentucky'sliterary legacy."—CrystalWilkinson, Kentucky's Poet Laureate and author of Perfect Black "Poignant,heartbreaking and uplifting, this collection of poetry is something wonderfulto live with, grapple with and absorb for generations to come."—Edward Lee,chef and winner of the James Beard Award for Buttermilk Graffitti                                                            

Promotional

Co-op availableGalleys available for national galley mailingNational advertisingNational print campaign targeting major trade publicationsSocial media campaigneBook available at time of print publicationRegional KY toursExcerpts featured in: Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), Poets.org, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.Promotion through /

Long Description

A Louisville Poets Anthology edited by Louisville native and acclaimed Horsepower poet Joy Priest. In this multi-generational anthology, thirty-seven living poets from Louisville archive the traditions and icons, landmarks and spirits, portraits and memories most personal to this shared place. Once a City Said takes the River 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 the socioeconomic circumstances of a city misshapen by segregation, a growing tourism industry, and subsequent ruptures in the public trust. In this collection of versifiers--ranging from Mitchell H. Douglas to Erin Keane and Ryan Ridge to Hannah Drake--each voice contributes to a community choir singing neglected stories and new visionary songs.

Review Quote

"Louisvillerepresent! I'm excited to see that Joy Priest has compiled a textured range ofcontemporary River City voices that capture the traditions, protests, memories,and spirit that is uniquely Louisville. This anthology is an engaging read thatspans voices, styles, and experiences. A wonderful accomplishment that saysonce and for all that Louisville has its own dazzling slice of Kentucky'sliterary legacy." --CrystalWilkinson, Kentucky's Poet Laureate and author of Perfect Black With thanks to the Fund for the Arts ArtsMatch and LGE & KU Foundation for their support.

Excerpt from Book

In the Shadow of the Spires The poets are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don''t, statesmen don''t, priests don''t, union leaders don''t. Only the poets. . . Something awful is happening to a civilization when it ceases to produce poets and when it ceases to believe in the report that only poets can make. --James Baldwin In June 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, I drove four days from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I''d been in residence at an artists'' fellowship, to my new home in Houston, Texas. Me and the 19 other artists there had been in a strict quarantine by order of the Massachusetts governor for several months, but the fellowship itself had already been a sort of socially isolating, off-grid experience--designed, as it were, so that we were at the very tip of the Cape in Provincetown during its tourist off-season, between the wintry months of October and April, surrounded by the sea. Most days it was dark by 3:30pm. Most days it hovered around 28 degrees. I bought a SAD lamp. I walked the cobblestoned ghost streets with my dog Luna. Then COVID hit, the requisite stay-in-place moratorium dropped, and a fatal rush of New Yorkers fleeing to their summer homes on the Cape bloated the tiny fishing town. Because the only way out was through a virus ravaged New York, our stay was extended to June 15. When me and Raul--a wood sculptor I had become close with over the course of the residency--pulled out of the parking lot on June 13, we drove off of the physical and existential island and into an America-on-fire. On the way to Houston, Raul and I, and my dog Luna, made several pitstops in Southern cities where we had friends or family, to take a break from driving. Little did we know it would be a tour through the country''s other crisis. Our first stop was Richmond, Virginia, where Raul had finished his MFA in sculpture. When we arrived, we immediately drove down Monument Avenue--its parade of Confederate statues lining the street''s median, leading up to the ultimate monument: a 21-foot-tall, 12-ton bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on a horse, which sat atop a 40-foot marble base in the middle of a roundabout. Virginians protesting the murder of George Floyd just two weeks before had already torn down the Jefferson Davis statue and, in the wake of these protests, Virginia''s governor ordered the removal of the Lee statue at a later date--probably owing more to reasons of safety than political commitment. As we approached the 60-foot leviathan on foot, I was rocked by the sight of rainbow graffiti covering it like kudzu and Black children climbing it or dancing around its base. It had been claimed and conquered. The people of Richmond had said what they needed to say. After Richmond, we stopped for two days at my parents'' home in Louisville, Kentucky, where I''d grown up, and where I''d left, finally, to pursue my career as a writer at the age of 26, five years earlier in 2015. I timed it perfectly so that I could vote in the primaries for Charles Booker (I was still legally a Kentucky resident after all). I knew how important the concept behind his senate campaign was: "From the hood to the holler." It had echoes of Fred Hampton''s rainbow coalition, which put cross-racial organizing against state power into praxis, and of which Kentucky and its working-class coal miners had once been a part. As people rushed into the fairgrounds convention center to vote, other Louisvillians gathered in Jefferson Square Park. Every evening that summer, the streets were filled with smoke, flash bangs, and tear gas, not just over the murder of George Floyd but also over the murder of one of our own by Louisville police: Breonna Taylor. More Louisvillians would be shot in the aftermath of Breonna''s death: seven protestors were mysteriously shot during marches on May 29; David "YaYa" McAtee was shot and killed on June 1 by the Kentucky Army National Guard in the door of his restaurant business in West Louisville, miles away from the protests; a photographer Tyler Gerth, godson of longtime Courier Journal columnist Joe Gerth was fatally shot in Jefferson Square Park on June 27, where he had been documenting the protests; and several protest leaders were harassed and killed in the aftermath of that summer--one of which is mentioned herein, in Alissa Vance''s poem "For Hamza ''Travis'' Nagdy," who was shot and killed on Nov. 23. In Louisville--the fourth most segregated city in the country after Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cleveland--Taylor''s murder reflected the reckless and hasty disregard for Black life by city officials, especially when those lives were connected in any way to the West end, Black Louisville. And disregard for Black life is often a socioeconomic barometer of the disregard for other marginalized populations. Before I left Louisville on my way to Texas, I went down to Jefferson Square Park to talk to protestors and to see the graffitied King Louis statue, a photo of which had been sent to me by my friend Chad Golden a few nights before. But this small, condemned statue of the far-removed French monarchy didn''t feel as impactful as it had in Richmond. The source of power was more obscure, decentralized than Confederate symbols of recent historical trauma. Kentucky was, after all, a slave-holding Union state, and Louisville was on a bondsman lease rather than plantation system--an even more peculiar version of "the Peculiar Institution." In that moment--as I stood looking up at this diminutive, handless statue of a king--felt like Louisvillians still had so much more to say. And this time, city and state officials were not vocally supportive of the protestors and their demands. They were responding with more murder, more power, more silence. I left Louisville unsure of how to be useful. By the time I got settled in Houston, my phone was blowing up. Writers were calling me, sending emails and poems, and the damning affidavits in the Breonna Taylor case. They were telling a story about an intentionally corrupt, unchecked police department and life in the shadow of the spires--those twin symbols of our world-famous racing track, which seemed like the only thing that mattered to our city leaders sometimes, which often seemed to be made more important than our lives. Even though I had--for the past five years--been like a balloon floating away, I had tried to stay in touch with my city as much as possible. At the same time, I was ascending further and further in my career and my book was coming out in a couple months--my first book, Horsepower, which read like an elegy for the city, and a love letter, all at once. I had a platform now. What could I do with it? How could I be useful from 14 hours away? In July, I taught a Sarabande-sponsored workshop for Louisville writers called "Against Silence: Writing Our Current National Moment." Out of that workshop came poems included in this anthology by Rheonna Nicole, Glenna Meeks, Mackenzie Berry, David Haydon, and Uy

Description for Sales People

Though focused exclusively on Louisville, it is a book of great national importance and interest. In the wake of 2020, a year in which many poets created work speaking to and through Louisville's social unrest, such a book is vital. Joy has established an excellent and successful reputation in the writing community at large, and for her book Horsepower, which centers around Louisville and the Kentucky Derby, no less. Her awards include: 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP, the 2022 Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, a 2021 NEA Fellowship and the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review. This book has a lot of local and regional support. Writer Minda Honey received a $250,000 grant to purchase visual art by Louisville artists to be housed in Sarabande's event space as a collaboration with the book. (Read more here: . We received $20,000 in funding for this project from Fund for the Arts, $10k of which was matched and $10k of which was crowdfunded. We will also do a big book launch at Derby. Jack Harlow is going to blurb the book! So will Charles Booker, Ada Limon, and others. Some of the poets featured: Joy Priest, Hannah Drake, Mitchell L. H. Douglas, John James, Erin Keane, Erin L. McCoy, Ryan Ridge, and more.

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