Introduction to the Special Edition: Black Appalachia, Parts I and II

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• Introduction to the Special Edition:Black Appalachia, Parts I and II
• Crystal Wilkinson (bio)

My voice, my spoken voice, with its lilt and twang is my birthright, straight from my geographical origin—the hills of Kentucky. When you hear me speak, you hear where I'm from. When I was a young writer, it made me angry. I wanted to be taken seriously, and I was more concerned with the ways that I held Black life up to the light in my stories, poems, and essays more than I was concerned with a discussion about region and what it meant to be from where. After all, the Black experience has never been one-eyed, and we are all rural if you go, at the least, two generations back: we all country, if we admit it.

My career was well under way before I claimed Appalachia; it's a word that, at least in its early usage, was defined as "white people indigenous to the Appalachian region." But when I met the Affrilachian Poets this notion changed. When Frank X Walker coined the phrase "Affrilachia" so many of the writers in our circle felt a new sense of identity. Up until then, we'd felt ill-fit in our existence as writers with one foot in the city and one in the world of our ancestors' American homelands. In the group, we felt a new sense of belonging. In Belonging: A Culture of Place, my dear friend bell hooks says, "I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream of that. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community." In Affrilachia we found beloved community and have been doing so for more than thirty years.

But that community is bigger than my personal history or the Affrilachian Poets, and it always has been. Black people in rural areas and in Appalachia with our talk and our talk back, with our folkways and foodways, with our downhomes and over yonders, make art, provide critical commentary, and give meaning to our lives and the lives of our ancestors. On these pages, you will see myriad representations of Black rural life. You will see Appalachia held up to the light to shine in all its complexity and all its beauty.

Beloved community is here on these pages. This pair of special issues is a record of the unique value and contribution of Black Appalachian life and art as well as a demonstration that we have existed for generations, long before we were ever named or called Appalachians. These volumes are to be shared and taught. Our first issue is creative, highlighting the contributions of writers writing out of and paying homage to the region. The second issue is a critical study of what it means to be from the region—past and future. I am immensely proud to have edited this special edition of Callaloo, Black Appalachia, Parts I and II and to be joined on these pages by writers who are deeply rooted in both the rural and Appalachian experiences. [End Page 1]

Crystal Wilkinson

CRYSTAL WILKINSON is the author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts (Clarkson Potter, 2024), a culinary memoir, Perfect Black (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), a collection of poems, and three works of fiction: The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. Wilkinson's work explores Black Appalachia and the rural South. She is a recent recipient of a Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books, the Mellon Foundation, and the Art for Justice Fund, and a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She has also been awarded an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including the Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Story, Agni, and Oxford American. She was the 2021–2023 poet laureate of Kentucky. Wilkinson is the editor of Screen Door Press, a visionary imprint from the University Press of Kentucky...