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. Her second book, Water Streetwas a finalist for the Orange Prize and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. 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.