FAREWELL and OPEN STUDIO: Jessica Lynne In Conversation with Professor Joy Priest

Join us for our Spring/Summer 2025 Literary Artist-in-Residence Jessica Lynne’s Farewell and Open Studio on Wednesday, July 30, 2025 from 5:30 – 7:30 PM.

Jessica will be in conversation with writer and professor Joy Priest.

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Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives, and host of the limited series podcast, Harlem is Everywhere. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, the Believer, Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and Oxford American, where she is a contributing editor. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation. She is the inaugural recipient of the Beverly Art Writers Travel Grant awarded in 2022 by the American Australian Association. She is an Associate Editor at Momus. Jessica holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught writing and lectured at institutions such as Colorado College, Northwestern University, The New School, and Yale School of Art.

Dr. Joy Priest

Dr. Joy Priest 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). Joy 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.   She received her doctorate in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston where she was an Imprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow. Joy 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 at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).