Case Study 2: Crystal Wilkinson and the Literature of Black Appalachia

The Invisible Presence

There is a word for what happens when you are from a place but the place does not claim you. When you belong to a community but the community's story does not include you. When the land is your land — the creeks you swam in, the dirt roads you walked, the gardens you tended, the churches you sang in — but the image of that land, as it circulates in the world, has no room for your face.

For Black Appalachians, this has been the condition of existence for centuries. Present in the mountains since the earliest days of settlement — as enslaved people, as free people of color, as farmers and miners and craftspeople and church members and parents and grandparents (see Chapters 6, 12, 19) — Black people have been systematically written out of the Appalachian story. The stereotypes say Appalachia is white. The folk music revival said Appalachian music is white. The literary tradition, for most of its history, said Appalachian literature is white.

Crystal Wilkinson has spent her career writing the correction.

A Writer's Formation

Crystal Wilkinson was born in 1962 and raised in Indian Creek, a small, predominantly Black rural community in Casey County, Kentucky. Casey County sits in the foothills where the Bluegrass region meets the Appalachian Mountains — geographically transitional, culturally complex, and home to Black families whose roots in the Kentucky soil go back generations.

Wilkinson's upbringing was rural in the deepest sense. Her family grew food, kept animals, and lived in intimate connection with the land. Her grandparents and great-grandparents had lived in the same area, and the knowledge they carried — of gardening, of cooking, of herbal medicine, of the rhythms of the seasons — was the same knowledge that white Appalachian writers celebrate in their own accounts of mountain life. The difference was that Wilkinson's family was Black, and the Appalachian literary tradition had not made space for their story.

Wilkinson studied at Eastern Kentucky University and later at Spalding University's MFA program. She taught creative writing at Indiana University and the University of Kentucky, and she became a central figure in the community of writers and artists who were, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, redefining what Appalachian literature could be and whose stories it could tell.

In 2021, Wilkinson was named Kentucky Poet Laureate — a recognition that placed a Black Appalachian woman at the center of the state's literary identity for the first time. The appointment was not symbolic. It was a statement about whose voice belongs to Kentucky and whose Kentucky belongs in literature.

Blackberries, Blackberries: Claiming the Landscape

Wilkinson's first book, Blackberries, Blackberries (2000), is a collection of interconnected short stories and prose pieces that center the lives of Black women in rural Kentucky. The title is the first assertion. Blackberries grow in the fields and along the fence rows of Kentucky. Black women live in the communities of Kentucky. Both are natural. Both are rooted. Both have been there longer than anyone can remember.

The stories in Blackberries, Blackberries are sensual, specific, and deeply grounded in the physical world. Wilkinson writes about gardens and kitchens and porches with the same loving attention that Lee Smith brings to her Virginia mountain women or that James Still brings to his eastern Kentucky hollows. She writes about the taste of food pulled from the earth, the smell of a woodstove, the feel of dirt between fingers, the sound of a grandmother's voice calling children home at dusk. These are the textures of Appalachian life — the same textures that white Appalachian literature has celebrated for a century — and Wilkinson claims them for Black women with a quiet, unshakable authority.

The collection also addresses the particular complexities of being Black in rural Kentucky. The women in Wilkinson's stories navigate racism — sometimes overt, more often the subtle, structural kind that manifests in who is visible and who is not, whose stories are told and whose are silenced. They also navigate the internal dynamics of their own communities — the pressures of family expectation, the burden of respectability, the sometimes suffocating closeness of a small community where everyone knows everything.

What is remarkable about Blackberries, Blackberries is its refusal to be defined by racial trauma. The stories are not about suffering. They are about living — about the full range of human experience as it unfolds in a particular place among particular people. The women in these stories laugh, love, fight, grieve, cook, garden, dream, and tell stories. They are not symbols of Black Appalachian resilience. They are people. And the insistence on their full humanity — on their right to be complicated, flawed, joyful, angry, sexual, spiritual, and alive — is Wilkinson's most powerful literary act.

The Birds of Opulence: A Multigenerational Epic

Wilkinson's novel The Birds of Opulence (2016) extends the project of Blackberries, Blackberries into a multigenerational narrative that traces the lives of several Black families in the fictional town of Opulence, Kentucky. The town is drawn from Wilkinson's experience of the small Black communities that exist throughout the Kentucky landscape — communities that are real, rooted, and almost completely invisible in the dominant narrative of Appalachian identity.

The novel moves through time without strict chronological order, weaving together the stories of women across three generations. At its center is the experience of motherhood — the fierce, complicated, sometimes destructive love that mothers carry for their children, and the ways in which that love is shaped by the pressures of race, place, and history. Mental illness — depression, anxiety, the particular psychological burden of living as a Black woman in a world that does not see you — runs through the novel as a persistent, haunting presence.

Opulence is a town with its own history, its own social hierarchies, its own secrets. The churches are centers of community life. The gardens are sources of food and beauty and continuity. The older women carry knowledge — of plants, of remedies, of stories, of the way things used to be — that the younger women need but do not always know how to receive. The novel is, among other things, a study of how knowledge is transmitted across generations, and what happens when the chain of transmission is broken by migration, by modernization, by the simple passage of time.

What makes The Birds of Opulence significant within the Appalachian literary tradition is not merely that it centers Black characters. It is that it insists on the Appalachian-ness of those characters. The people of Opulence are mountain people. They share the values, the foodways, the speech patterns, the relationship to land that define Appalachian culture across racial lines. They are not outsiders in the mountains. They are not exceptions to the Appalachian story. They are the Appalachian story — a part of it that has been there all along, waiting to be written.

Wilkinson and the Affrilachian Movement

Wilkinson's work cannot be understood in isolation from the broader Affrilachian movement described in Chapter 28. She is one of the founding members of the Affrilachian Poets, the collective of Black writers and artists organized by Frank X Walker in the early 1990s, and her literary practice is inseparable from the collective's mission: to make Black Appalachian identity visible, to claim the mountains as home, and to create a body of literature that reflects the full diversity of Appalachian experience.

The Affrilachian Poets gave Wilkinson a community of writers who understood her project — who knew what it meant to be Black and Appalachian, who had experienced the same invisibility, and who were committed to the same work of recovery and assertion. The collective also gave her an intellectual framework: the idea that naming is an act of power, that creating a word ("Affrilachian") and a literature to fill it is a form of political and cultural action.

Wilkinson has described the Affrilachian movement as a homecoming — the experience of finally finding a name for something she had always known but had never been able to articulate. She was from the mountains. She was Black. These two facts had always coexisted in her life, but the world had insisted that they could not. The Affrilachian movement gave her permission to insist that they could — and that they always had.

What Wilkinson's Work Does to the Canon

The entrance of Crystal Wilkinson — and, more broadly, of Black Appalachian writers — into the Appalachian literary tradition does not diminish the tradition. It transforms it.

Before Wilkinson, the Appalachian literary canon told a story that was powerful but incomplete. It was a story about white mountain people — their courage, their suffering, their beauty, their resilience. It was a story about the exploitation of the land and the people who lived on it. It was a story about the gap between the mountains as outsiders imagined them and the mountains as insiders knew them. All of this was true. But it was not the whole truth.

Wilkinson's work adds what was missing. It adds Black women to the porches. It adds Black gardens to the hillsides. It adds Black voices to the chorus of mountain speech. It adds Black grief, Black joy, Black love, Black anger, Black beauty to a literary tradition that had been rendering these things invisible for a century.

Reading Wilkinson alongside James Still does not diminish Still. It places him in context. It reveals what his vision included and what it did not. Still was a great writer, but his eastern Kentucky was a white eastern Kentucky. Wilkinson's Kentucky is a Black Kentucky — no less real, no less rooted, no less Appalachian. The two Kentuckys exist in the same landscape, on the same ridges, along the same creeks. The literary tradition is richer for acknowledging both.

This is what diversity means in a literary context — not the inclusion of different voices for the sake of inclusion, but the completion of a picture that was always incomplete. A literature of Appalachia that includes only white voices is not a complete literature. It is a literature with a hole in the shape of the people it has refused to see. Wilkinson's work fills that hole. And in filling it, she makes the entire tradition more honest, more complex, and more true.

The Work That Remains

Wilkinson's achievement is significant, but it is also the beginning of something rather than its completion. The literature of Black Appalachia is still young — still finding its forms, still discovering its subjects, still building the audience that it deserves. There are stories that have not yet been told: the stories of Black coal miners, of Black mountain women, of Black communities that persisted through Jim Crow and the Great Migration and the economic collapse of the late twentieth century. There are histories that have not yet been novelized, poems that have not yet been written, voices that have not yet been heard.

Wilkinson has opened the door. She has demonstrated that Black Appalachian literature is not a contradiction in terms but a rich, necessary, and long-overdue addition to the American literary landscape. The writers who follow her — and they will follow, because the stories are there, waiting — will build on the foundation she has laid.

The mountains belong to everyone who has lived in them. The literature of the mountains should, too.

Discussion Questions

1. Wilkinson's Blackberries, Blackberries centers the lives of Black women in rural Kentucky. How does reading these stories change your understanding of what "Appalachian literature" is? Does the racial identity of the characters affect how you read the landscape, the speech patterns, the cultural practices described in the stories?

2. The case study argues that the invisibility of Black Appalachians in literature is not an accident but a product of the same cultural forces that constructed the "white Appalachia" myth. How were these forces maintained in the literary tradition specifically? What role did publishers, reviewers, anthologists, and university curricula play in excluding Black Appalachian voices?

3. Wilkinson has been named Kentucky Poet Laureate. What is the significance of this appointment? How does placing a Black Appalachian woman in this role challenge existing assumptions about Kentucky identity and Appalachian culture?

4. The case study describes Wilkinson's work as "completing" rather than "diminishing" the existing Appalachian literary canon. Do you agree with this framing? Is it possible to add to a literary tradition without challenging or displacing the works that were already there?

5. Compare Crystal Wilkinson's depiction of rural Kentucky in Blackberries, Blackberries or The Birds of Opulence with James Still's depiction in River of Earth or Lee Smith's depiction in Fair and Tender Ladies. What do these works share? What distinguishes them? How does race shape the experience of the same landscape?