The Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University is delighted to announce that Crystal Wilkinson will serve as our Spring 2027 Writer-in-Residence.
A recent recipient of a Writing Freedom fellowship, Crystal 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, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. She was recently inducted into the Kentucky Literary Hall of Fame, and her memoir Heartsick is forthcoming from Crown.
This spring, Crystal will teach Writing Fractured Beauty (ENG 351/552), a hybrid craft course exploring fragmented forms across fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
Hollins MFA 