Crystal Wilkinson: 48th Annual ODU Literary Festival
Document Type
Featured Participant
Festival Date
10-7-2025
Location
University Theatre, Old Dominion University; Baron & Ellin Gordon Art Galleries
Author/Artist Bio
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 Division of Creative Writing. Her memoir Heartsick is forthcoming from Crown.
Description
Wilkinson read from her works on Tuesday, October 7, 2025, at 7:00 PM in the University Theatre at Old Dominion University. She also led a writing workshop on Wednesday, October 8 at 12:00 PM in the Baron & Ellin Gordon Art Galleries at Old Dominion University.
Recommended Citation
Wilkinson, Crystal, "Crystal Wilkinson: 48th Annual ODU Literary Festival" (2025). 48th Annual Literary Festival at ODU: October 5-10, 2025. 18.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/litfest-2025/18