Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s Poet Laureate, will present “Mining for Memories,” the Women’s History and First Amendment Week Keynote Address, Tuesday, April 12, 7:30 p.m. in O’Donnell Hall.
Wilkinson is the award-winning author of Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction: The Birds of Opulence, Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of a 2021 O. Henry Prize, a 2020 USA Artists Fellowship and a 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Nominated for the John Dos Passos Award, the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts and others.
Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, is forthcoming from Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House in August 2023.
She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is associate professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Her presentation is sponsored by EKU Libraries, the ICCA School of Communication and the Honors Program.