4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Hildreth-Mirza Hall, 101/102 – Great Room
Join us for Crystal Wilkinson’s closing keynote for this year’s themed program: Black Appalachia and the Search for Nowhere.
A poet, novelist, and essayist, Wilkinson has received numerous awards and accolades for her work.
She received a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2025. 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.
This event is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences and the Dalal Family Fund for Creativity and Innovation.
