Black History Month Events
West Kentucky Community and Technical College promotes equity as we champion student success, provide excellence in teaching and learning, and advance economic development within a diverse and inclusive campus community.
Crystal Wilkinson, a recent recipient of a Writing Freedom fellowship, is the award-winning
author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a national-bestselling 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, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest
J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. 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 was Poet
Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. She currently teaches creative writing at
the University of Kentucky where she is a Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor and Director
of the Divsion of Creative Writing. Her memoir Heartsick is forthcoming from Crown.
Admission is free. All seating is general admission.
