Residency Dates: May 12, 2024 - June 01, 2024
Application Deadline: December 10, 2023
Crystal Wilkinson is a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers
Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is Kentucky’s Poet Laureate. She is the award-winning author of 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 a 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, a 2021 O. Henry Prize, a 2020 USA Artists Fellowship, and a 2016 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. Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, is forthcoming from Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program. For more information, visit www.crystalewilkinson.net.
Residency Statement
I would like to work with writers who are on the verge of change (within themselves and/or on their work). Writers of fiction, nonfiction, and narrative poetry are welcome. We will focus on generative exercises with the idea of making something whole during our time together. The second and third weeks will continue our generation of ideas but we will also focus on revision. We will form community. We will take time to think and take risks and meander toward new territory. We will consider our lives as writers. We will re-see and reconsider what we’ve already written. There will be an opportunity for individual conferences as needed or desired.
Application Requirements
- CV / Resume
- Submit a 10-15 page sample of your work
- Submit a one-page statement about your experience as a writer
- Describe what you hope to accomplish during the residency
Application Fee: $25 | Apply