Soul in them there Hills

Black Issues Book Review, March, 2001 by Quraysh Ali Lansana

Affrilatian artists take their stand as a school of black poets from the Kentucky foothills

Sometime during the Fall of 1991, a literary event was held at the University of Kentucky, called The Best of Southern Writing, featuring four white Kentucky authors and one African American writer, South Carolina native Nikky Finney. The program was originally entitled The Best in Applachian Writing, but because of Finney's participation, the name was changed.

Emerging poet Frank X. Walker attended this reading and was so intrigued by the attention paid to the name change that he decided to go home and look up the term Appalachian in his edition of Webster's New World Dictionary. He was stunned to find it defined so narrowly. The definition referred only to the white race of people living in the region of the Appalachian Mountains. "It meant I could never be, could never consider myself, Appalachian." Which didn't make a great deal of sense to Walker, a native of Danville and a descendent of three generations of black Kentuckians from the foothills of the mountain range.

"I felt as if I were being locked out of something important to me. Something that had always been a part of who I am," Walker said. "I could never afford a therapist, so I went to my journal to help me make sense of it."

   ... some of the bluegrass
   is black
   enough to know
   that being colored and all
   is generally lost
   somewhere between
   the dukes of hazzard
   and the beverly hillbillies
   but
   if you think
   makin shine from corn
   is as hard as kentucky coal
   imagine being
   an Affrilachian
   poet

--from Affrilachia

Walker took the poem with his new term, Affrilachian, to the writing group he met with regularly at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center on the UK campus, where he also served as program coordinator.

There was an electric response from the writing collective. There was something about the word that the group connected with, said Walker, who is now director of the Kentucky Governors School for the Arts. The group of eleven writers, which had been meeting informally for some time, now had an identity and a focus.

There are currently seventeen active members of the Affrilachian Poets. The founding members are Kelly Norman Ellis, Nikky Finney, Frank X. Walker, and Gerald Coleman. Other original members include Thomas Aaron, Shanna Smith and Mitchell L.H. Douglas. Miysan Crosswhite, Daudra Scisney-Givens, Richard Donelan and Ricardo Nazario Colon were also present from the beginning. Additional members include Crystal Wilkinson, Bernard Clay and Julian Long. Paul Taylor, Dan Woo, and Jude McPherson round out the list of current members.

The group has also inducted honorary members such as UK professor Gurney Norman, poet and journalist Peter Harris, highly decorated poet Nikki Giovanni, author and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and renowned fiction writer and poet Opal Palmer Adisa.

"Being an Affrilachian poet means that these black poets have founded a country where we might stand, stake a flag, and hear each other," said Finney, one of the groups founders and an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

Perhaps the most critically acclaimed member of the group, Finney has published two books of poetry, On Wings Made of Gauze (William Morrow, 1985) and Rice (Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press, 1995), and has just completed a third collection, The World Is Round. She was actually teaching and writing in California when "The Best of Southern Writing" event took place. "They had to import a writer of color," said Walker.

"Without the group, I would have continued to be a closet writer," said poet, fiction writer and charter member Crystal E. Wilkinson, author of the recently published short story collection Blackberries, Blackberries (The Toby Press, 2000).

Wilkinson, a native of Indian Creek, Kentucky, was a member of the only African American family in her rural hometown. "My two cousins and I went from head start to high school as the only blacks in the entire county school system. It was a strange experience, but it framed who I am." It was probably a blessing in a strange way. If other black kids were around, I probably would have played more instead of reading and wondering about the world, she said.

The Affrilachian Poets group is open to writers of all ethnic backgrounds, even though the group was born in response to marginalization. "We have spent a lot of time discussing whether we would be exclusive," said Walker. "UK Professor Gurney Norman, a white man, has been there from the beginning. He has advised and supported us over the years, so we made him an honorary member."

"We have created an identity for ourselves," said Walker. "We wrote ourselves into a writing tradition that didn't leave room for us. We defined ourselves, and we're still doing that." Walkers first full-length book of poems, appropriately entitled Affrilachia, was published last year by Old Cove Press.