Posted on December 10, 2024
The MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro and The Class of 1952 will host a fiction and poetry by Ananda Lima and Joy Priest on Thursday, February 27th at 6PM in UNCG Alumni House, 404 College Avenue. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by reception and book signing.
ANANDA LIMA is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books,2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She was awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. Lima has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. She is the Fall 2024 Flagler Storytellers Author in Residence. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and The New York Times Review of Books describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.
JOY PRIEST (she/her) is a writer from Louisville, KY. She is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Imprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, 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, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Priest received her bachelor’s in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky, her MFA in Poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina, and her doctorate from the University of Houston where she was an Imprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow. Joy has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets. She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diaspora Poetry in the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA Writing Program, and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice (CCPP) at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).
For directions and more information about parking: https://idcapps.uncg.edu/access/access.html?id=Alumni House
