When Crystal Wilkinson was growing up on her grandparents’ farm in Casey County, there were no playmates nearby. So she would walk to Indian Creek, talk to the minnows and imagine what they might be thinking. Or she would climb the knob behind the house, look far into the distance and wonder if another little girl somewhere was doing the same thing.
“Books became my companions,” she said in an interview. “As I was roaming around, I was thinking about stories. My grandmother always read to me. I could read before I went to school and I loved reading and loved writing. I was always living in the mind, and I always had a notebook with me.”
Those early experiences have informed Wilkinson’s career as a poet, short-story writer, novelist, essayist, creative writing professor and Poet Laureate of Kentucky (2021-2022). She was a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, whose goal was to explore a rich history of Black culture in rural Kentucky that has often been ignored.
Wilkinson’s fifth book, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks made many lists of national best-sellers and best-books in 2024. Her 2021 poetry collection, Perfect Black, won her the NAACP Image Award for Poetry. She has received many awards for her 2016 novel, The Birds of Opulence, and her earlier short story collections, Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries.
Wilkinson, 62, was born in Hamilton, Ohio, but spent most of her childhood with her grandparents because of her mother’s mental illness. She loved writing and art, but took high school classes in typing and shorthand because it seemed like a good path to a job.
She earned an art scholarship to Eastern Kentucky University, but art history classes bored her. “So I majored in journalism and took all the creative writing classes Eastern had to offer,” she said.
After graduation and a brief career as an accounts receivable supervisor for a window replacement company, Wilkinson landed a job writing obituaries and news notes for the Lexington Herald-Leader. She later became a public information officer for the city.
“I always had creative writing on the side,” she said. “I was so fascinated by the Carnegie Center; this idea of going from literacy to literary. I would run over from the city on my lunch hour and sit in on (writer and artist) Laverne Zabielski’s class, do some free writing and come back.”
She became involved with the Affrilachian Poets, attended local readings and went to the Appalachian Writers Workshop. While working in public relations at Midway College, she was accepted into a prestigious Hurston/Wright Foundation workshop in Virginia. She needed help with transportation there, so the college president loaned her his official Cadillac — “the biggest car I’ve ever driven.”
At that workshop, Wilkinson met her first agent, Marie Brown, who had worked with Toni Morrison. Brown eventually helped her publish Blackberries, Blackberries, which came out after Wilkinson was working as assistant director of the Carnegie Center.
“I always thought success would be if I had a short story published in a magazine I had heard of,” she said. But Blackberries attracted the attention of several publishers interested in future work. “The fire had been lit,” she said.
Wilkinson had always thought she was too shy to teach, but after working at the Carnegie Center “the teaching bug bit me very hard.” After earning an MFA in creative writing in Spalding’s first low-residency class, she taught at Berea College and then joined the University of Kentucky’s creative writing faculty.
Wilkinson and her husband Ron Davis, a visual artist and poet, started and are the former owners of Wild Fig Books & Coffee in Lexington. The store’s name comes from the work of reclusive Lexington novelist Gayl Jones, whom Wilkinson has long admired but never met.
Wilkinson sees all of her writing as connected, as if ideas are running a relay race from one book to the next one. Her central theme is Black life in rural Kentucky.
“I think one of the preeminent jobs of the Kentucky writer is to hold the complications of our life up to the light, even to pay honor to that in some way,” she said. “Mainstream America has a homogenized, wrong view about Kentucky. I feel like we’re constantly trying to hold our experiences, or the experiences of our people, up as if to say to the rest of the country, ‘See! This, too, is Kentucky.”
Wilkinson does most of her writing in her home office, or on the couch with a laptop or outside in warm weather. Before she begins, she seeks inspiration from a poem or a passage from a writer she admires. She has a long list of favorites, including Jones, Nikky Finney (her best friend), Joy Harjo, George Ella Lyon and Michael Ondaatje.
Wilkinson is currently writing a book called Heartsick, about her mother’s mental health challenges, which Crown plans to publish in 2026. After that, she has another novel percolating, as well as a collection of short stories. Ideas are never in short supply.
“For me, ideas are like a rolodex; I’ve got ideas rolling all the time,” she said. “But it’s not until something haunts me that I can write about it.”
Many of Wilkinson’s books are dark, and after Heartsick her goal is to write something lighter. “I really want to find my funny bone again,” she said. “I want to leave behind a nuanced look at Black people in rural Kentucky. I think what I’ve been put here to do is hold Kentucky up to the light — my Kentucky up to the light — for everyone else to see. Not so much to judge, but to say, ‘This, too, is Kentucky.’”
Selected Bibliography
- Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks. (Potter/Penguin Random House, 2023)
- Perfect Black, (University Press of Kentucky, 2021)
- The Birds of Opulence (University Press of Kentucky, 2016)
- Water Street (Toby Press, 2002, 2005. University Press of Kentucky, 2017)
- Blackberries, Blackberries (Toby Press, 2000. University Press of Kentucky, 2017)
Awards
- NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Poetry for Perfect Black (2022)
- Poet Laureate of Kentucky (2021-2022)
- O. Henry Award in Fiction for “Endangered Species: Case 47401” (2021)
- Thomas D. Clark Medallion Book Award for Perfect Black (2021)
- The Rockefeller Foundation United States Artists Fellow (2020)
- Weatherford Award for Appalachian Fiction for The Birds of Opulence (2017)
- Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for The Birds of Opulence (2016)
- Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature for Blackberries, Blackberries (2002)
