An Evening with Crystal Wilkinson @ Kirby

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. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023.

This program is an expansion of the National Book Festival held in Washington, D.C. each year and organized by the Library of Congress.The National Book Festival’s Roadmap to Reading is made possible by generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities with additional support from Chief Officers of State Library Agencies.The tour in Kentucky was developed as a partnership with the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, the Kentucky Book Festival, the Kentucky Center for the Book, and Kentucky Humanities.