Recent Honors/Awards

selected

2024   

  • Anne Spencer Fellow from Virginia Creative Center for the Arts

  • Black Woman in Food Award (amplifier)

  • Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation

  • Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers and Mentoring Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts

           

2023 

  • Bush Holbrook Endowed Professor of English

  •  University Research Professor

  • Kaleidoscope Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, C.T. and Octavia Vivian Museum and Archives

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2022 

2021 

  • Kentucky Poet Laureate

  • O. Henry Award

  • Thomas D. Clark Medallion Book Award,

  • Perfect Black: named one of four poetry books to read by The New York Times Book Review (August 14, 2021) and named one of the most exciting and necessary collections of poetry of 2021 by Ms Magazine, Kentucky Reads Book Choice

 

2020 

 

2019   

  • Yaddo Fellowship

  • Appalachian Heritage Award

  • Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Arts

  • Hermitage Residency

  • Finalist John Dos Passos Prize

  • One Book/One Read West Virginia

2018   

  • Vermont Studio Center

  • Open Canon Book Club pick

  • Opal Moore Writer-in-Residence,

  • One Book/One Read Western Kentucky Community and Technical College

 

2017   

  • Judy Gaines Young Award

  • The Weatherford Award for Appalachian Fiction

  • Nominated for USA Artists Fellowship

  • Writing Rhetoric & Digital Studies Community Writing Award

2016