[View ALL News Press Releases] Kentucky author Crystal Wilkinson will give a reading from her works on Thursday March 20 at 7 pm at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College in the Administration Building's Morrison Gallery. Wilkinson will also sign her books, which will be for sale at the reading. This event is sponsored by the Benjamin Peace Fund and is free to the public.

Crystal is the author of Water Street (Toby Press, 2002), which was nominated for the Orange Prize and for the Zora Neal Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation's Legacy Award in Fiction, and Blackberries, Blackberries (Toby Press, 2000) which was named Best Debut Fiction by Today's Librarian Magazine. Crystal is writer in residence and visiting associate professor at Morehead State University and the 2002 recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She is a member of a Lexington-based writing collective The Affrilachian Poets and has presented workshops and readings throughout the country, including the Sixth International Conference on the Short Story in English at the University of Iowa and the African American Women Writers Conference at the University of the District of Columbia. She has been published widely in anthologies including Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talkfrom an American Region (University of Kentucky Press, 1999); Gifts from Our Grandmothers (Crown Publishers, a Division of Random House, 2000); Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium (Purdue University, 1998); Home and Beyond: A Half-Century of Short Stories by Kentucky Writers (University of Kentucky Press, 2001); and Gumbo: Stories by Black Writers (Doubleday, Harlem Moon Press, 2002). Her work has also appeared in various literary journals including Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, Southern Exposure, The Briar Cliff Review, LIT, Calyx, African Voices, and the Indiana Review. Crystal is the former creative writing chair of the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts and former assistant director of The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. She is a graduate of the Spalding MFA in Writing Program.

For more information, contact Mick Kennedy at 270-706-8407 or e-mail mick.kennedy@kctcs.edu.