Crystal Wilkinson on writing to the bone, and spoken dialect as a "revolutionary act"

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We're revisiting Season One and an episode with the legendary Crystal Wilkinson, author of Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts (which was published after this episode aired) and other works. Crystal discusses her journey from trying to erase her Appalachian accent to embracing it as an essential part of her identity and craft. She calls her native dialect her "mother tongue" and describes the revolutionary act of allowing her "tongue to rest in its normal state."

Crystal reads several powerful poems featuring her grandparents' voices:

• "Black Rapunzel" about her mother's struggle with schizophrenia
• "The Water Witch" series: poems in her grandfather's voice about wisdom, land, and literacy
• "Old Tobacco": a love letter to Kentucky's tobacco heritage

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.

Ivy Attic Co
Jewelry from coal, river glass, and discarded books handcrafted in the central Appalachian Mountains

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Unless another artist is featured, acoustic music on most episodes: "Freight Train" written by Elizabeth Cotten and performed by Landon Spain