OCTC to Host KY's Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson
Tues., Oct. 19 at 12:30 p.m.
Owensboro, KY (10/13/2021) — The Owensboro Community and Technical College Common Reading selection for the Fall 2021 semester is The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson, and the author's visit is scheduled for Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 12:30 p.m.; additional details and related events will be shared on campus and on the Common Reading Facebook page at www.facebook.com/OCTC.CommonRead. All OCTC Common Reading events are free and open to the public, the event will also be streamed. Wilkinson is Kentucky's Poet Laureate for 2021-22, the first Black woman to be selected for this honor.
The Birds of Opulence is the winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and the Weatherford Award for Fiction; it was nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Wilkinson has received recognition from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including most recently in the Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Her next book, a collection of poetry, Perfect Black was released in August. Both Birds of Opulence and Perfect Black will be available at the OCTC bookstore and may be purchased at the event on October 19.
The Birds of Opulence focuses on generations of women in a rustic southern black township as they live with, and sometimes surrender to, mental illness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch Minnie Mae, is plagued by secrets and embarrassment. Single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead husband and forced to fight against the moral judgment of the community and her rebellious daughter. The residents of Opulence struggle with puzzling relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves. Crystal Wilkinson creates the town of Opulence and its people in poetic detail, a world of magic and spells, but also one of harsh realities.
About Crystal Wilkinson
Crystal Wilkinson is from Indian Creek, in Casey County, Kentucky, and is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poet movement. She is a 2020 US Artists Fellow and teaches at the University of Kentucky (UK). Her work involves the stories of Black women and communities in the Appalachian and rural Southern literary canon. She was born in Hamilton, Ohio, and grew up with her grandparents on their farm. After graduating from Casey County High School, Wilkinson attended Eastern Kentucky University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism and she holds a Master of Fine Arts
in creative writing from Spalding University. After graduation, Wilkinson worked at the Lexington Herald-Leader as a news and market research assistant. She worked as a public information officer for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government and began volunteering her time with the Roots and Heritage Festival. Wilkinson joined other Kentucky African-American writers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center at UK where Frank X Walker was the assistant director. The group, later called The Affrilachian Poets, was mentored by the poet Nikky Finney who was then teaching at UK. In 1997, Wilkinson became the assistant director for the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, in Lexington, where she taught writing and implemented a variety of programs and activities for Kentucky's literary arts scene and education efforts, including School After School tutoring for elementary students, Young Women Writers Project, and New Books by Great Writers, which is now called the Kentucky Great Writers Series.
She has taught creative writing and literature at Eastern Kentucky University, Indiana University-Bloomington, Morehead State University, and Berea College. She and her partner, the artist Ronald Davis, were the founders and editors of the briefly published Mythium: A Journal of Contemporary Literature, a journal that celebrated writers of color as well as other cultural voices and were co-owners of Wild Fig Books and Coffee in Lexington.
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