Black American Writers Series
Crystal Wilkinson |
March 4, 2025 |
1:30-3:00 in the Reece Museum:
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Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country CooksA lyrical culinary journey that explores the hidden legacy of Black Appalachians, through powerful storytelling alongside nearly forty comforting recipes, from the former poet laureate of Kentucky. |
Crystal Wilkinson a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, 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 an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Named Kentucky’s Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Bush-Holbrook Professor in Creative Writing.
The Black American Writers Series is a partnership between Black American Studies, The Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative, and the Department of Literature & Language. The interdisciplinary series is set in the heart of Black American Studies, a major interdisciplinary program in the College of Arts & Sciences. This series brings noteworthy essayists, poets, writers, journalists, historians, and others to the campus of East Tennessee State University to highlight and spotlight the contributions of Black American Writers.
The Black American Studies program and Art & Design’s Slocumb Galleries were proud
to present internationally recognized poet Nikki Giovanni to speak at East Tennessee
State University on September 20, 2022.
Nikki Giovanni is a poet, professor, author, and internationally recognized for her
distinguished contributions to the field. Her works, such as Black Feeling, Black
Talk, Bicycles: Love Poems, and Those Who Ride the Night Winds, have made her one
of America’s most important voices on the Black experience since the late 1960s. She
is also a professor at Virginia Tech University, where she was a powerful voice in
the aftermath of the mass shooting there in 2007, representing a campus devastated
by the loss of so many lives. Her marks went viral, thus reflecting this simple fact:
it is the humanities which explains our world, bringing us together, and supplies
the healing balm when tragedy strikes.