Wilkinson is the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Kentucky Arts Council, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts and the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is the recent winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage Magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women for the promotion of activism and feminist artist expression.
She has presented workshops and readings throughout the country, including the International Conference on the Short Story in English at the University of Iowa, the Ocean State Writers Conference 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 Talk from 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, the Indiana Review, SLICE, Appalachian Heritage and others. Crystal is the former assistant director of The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and she is a graduate of the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program.
Wilkinson served on the creative writing faculty for the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts from 1997-2001. She was also a featured writer/teacher on the documentary "Coal Black Voices" (2001), "GED Connections" (2001) and “James Still’s Legacy” (2003) film series produced by PBS Kentucky Educational Television.
Wilkinson currently heads the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Morehead State University where she teaches writing and literature. She has also taught in the brief residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University and the traditional MFA in Creative Writing Program at Indiana University--Bloomington. She and her partner artist Ron Davis, are founders and editors of Mythium: A Journal of Contemporary Literature Celebrating Writers of Color and the Cultural Voice.
(please don't pull information from crystalwilkinson.com This site is no longer in my control and is outdated)
