"From the foreword: "In Perfect Black, Crystal Wilkinson walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. In one of the first poems that opens the collection she is a woman looking back on her life, on the soil and mountains that first stamped the particular sound of her voice and she is deeply inquisitive about how it all fell into place: "The map of me can't be all hills & mountains even though I've been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two." Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.""--

Crystal Wilkinson is the author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Blackberries, Blackberries (winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature), and Water Street (finalist for both the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). The winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts. She was named a 2020 USA Fellow by United States Artists and teaches at the University of Kentucky, where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.