Fiction
The Birds of Opulence
Crystal Wilkinson
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission
Generations of women in a Kentucky community live with losses and knowledge that are carried through families.
Reading list
Kentucky Black Writers
Poetry, fiction, memoir, and essays by writers with documented Kentucky ties.
Read Frank X Walker alongside Crystal Wilkinson to compare two ways of writing Black Appalachia. Add bell hooks for questions of belonging and Nikky Finney for a different approach to public and family memory. William Wells Brown provides an earlier Lexington-area point of entry.
Continue the story
Recommended reading
Poetry
Affrilachia
Frank X Walker
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission
Walker’s poems insist on the visibility of Black lives in the language and geography of Appalachia.
Poetry
Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride
Frank X Walker
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission
A poetry sequence approaches the life of the celebrated Black jockey through imagined voices.
Memoir
Bone Black
bell hooks
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
Fragmentary memories trace the making of a writer in a Black Southern family.
Essays
Belonging: A Culture of Place
bell hooks
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
Essays on place, race, land, and return connect hooks’s Kentucky roots with a wider ethic of belonging.
Poetry
Buffalo Dance
Frank X Walker
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
A sequence of poems imagines the perspective of York, the enslaved participant in the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Poetry
Turn Me Loose
Frank X Walker
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
Poems use distinct voices to consider the killing of Medgar Evers and the persistence of public memory.
Poetry
Perfect Black
Crystal Wilkinson
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
Poems consider color, family, girlhood, and the landscapes that shaped Wilkinson’s sense of home.
Memoir
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts
Crystal Wilkinson
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission
Recipes and recollections connect Appalachian foodways with the stories of Black women across generations.
Short stories
Water Street
Crystal Wilkinson
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
Linked stories enter the lives of neighbors in a small Kentucky community, revealing their private and shared histories.
Poetry
Head Off & Split
Nikky Finney
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission
Finney’s poems move between family, public history, and the language that mediates what people see.
Poetry
Rice
Nikky Finney
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
Rice ties family stories and foodways to Black Southern histories of labor and survival.
Picture book
A is for Affrilachia
Frank X Walker
Bookshop.org cover · Lyric may earn a commission · Alternate edition
An illustrated alphabet introduces places, people, and traditions in Black Appalachia.
Memoir
Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
William Wells Brown
Brown describes enslavement and escape, illuminating a life that began near Lexington and led into abolitionism.
Fiction
Clotel
William Wells Brown
Brown’s novel follows women navigating slavery and family separation in the early United States.