Water Street

Crystal Wilkinson is the author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Blackberries, Blackberries (winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature), and Water Street (finalist for both the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). The winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts. She was named a 2020 USA Fellow by United States Artists and teaches at the University of Kentucky, where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Evidence of Wilkinson's considerable promise [....] Water Street continues to establish her as an author who deserves wider attention."" - The Washington Post""A sharp African American updating of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio."" - Utne Reader (Utne Book Club Selection, July 2003)""Wilkinson is a storyteller in the tradition of Southerners such as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers."" - Lexington Herald-Leader