2025 Corrington Award to be bestowed Monday, October 27

Centenary College of Louisiana is proud to announce that author Crystal Wilkinson will be awarded the 2025 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence. The College’s English Department will present the award on Monday, October 27, in Centenary’s Marjorie Lyons Playhouse. Attendees are asked to join the celebration of literature and art by wearing “red carpet” worthy attire.

The Corrington ceremony begins at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. It will also be streamed live on Facebook at facebook.com/CentenaryCollegeLa. Wilkinson will offer a reading and answer audience questions during the event, with a reception and book signing to follow.

Wilkinson, an NAACP Image Award winner and O. Henry Prize recipient, was Kentucky’s poet laureate from 2021 to 2023. She has written and published many short stories, poems, and essays, including the poetry and prose collection Perfect Black; the novel The Birds of Opulence; the short story collections Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Wilkinson currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

Her newest book, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, shares stories and recipes from five generations of Black country cooks from the hills of Appalachia. In Praisesong, Wilkinson shares treasured family dishes while drawing the reader into a hidden history of Black people considered largely invisible in the hilly Kentucky region of Indian Creek, southeast of Lexington. A descendant of freed slaves, she brings her family back to life through stories passed down for generations and recipes that fill the stomach and the soul.

“The concept of kitchen ghosts came to me years ago when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove,” wrote Wilkinson in Praisesong. “The art of cooking and engaging with my kitchen ghosts made me realize that food is never just about the present – every dish, every slice, every crumb and kernel also tethers us to the past.”

When Dr. Rachel Johnson, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Centenary, first read Praisesong, she was inspired to share memories about family and food with close friends and strangers alike.

“I knew that our students would connect with her work and be inspired to reflect on their own experiences as well,” said Johnson. “Wilkinson reminds us that food is a kind of language. Through her work, we learn how the meals we share and the recipes we inherit reveal who we are and what we value, offering our newest students a great connection to their first-year seminar course, Credo (Latin for ‘I believe’).”

Credo is part of Centenary College’s unique TREK program which begins with Centenary in Paris, and also includes sections on Community and Culture.

“Food writing is never just about food—it is storytelling, cultural memory, and a lens through which we understand who we are. The best food writers transform the sensory into the spiritual and the recipe into revelation, reminding us that taste, labor, and inheritance are inseparable from our shared histories,” said Dr. Chrissy Martin, Assistant Professor of English. “Crystal Wilkinson’s work exemplifies this power. Her writing blends research, history, and lived experience to honor the relationship between food and ancestry, revealing how cooking becomes both creative labor and cultural preservation. In welcoming her to campus for the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, we celebrate food writing as both art and scholarship—a way of studying how what we cook and remember connects us to one another across time and place.”

The Centenary English Department sponsors two writing contests for students in conjunction with the Corrington Award. The Corrington Excellence in Freshman Writing Essay Contest, sponsored by the First-Year Program. It invites essays from first-year students inspired by Wilkinson’s work. The Corrington Creative Writing Award is open to all Centenary students. It focuses on poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or hybrid work also inspired by themes found in Wilkinson’s writing and is presented by the English Department.

All of the contests feature cash prizes totaling $800 as well as opportunities for publication.  Winning writing will be published in the campus newspaper, The Conglomerate, and the campus literary magazine, Pandora.

Centenary students will also showcase their artistic talents during the Corrington Award ceremony. Members of the Black Student Union will share their favorite recipes and last year’s creative writing contest winner, Aaliyah Vines, will perform her poetry.

The annual Corrington Award and the student writing contests are generously underwritten by the Attaway Professorships in Civic Culture Program, the Centenary Learning Commons, and the Centenary First-Year Program. More information about the 2025 Corrington Award is available at centenary.edu/corrington.

About the Corrington Award

The John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence is presented annually by the Department of English at Centenary on behalf of the Centenary student body and faculty to an established, critically-acknowledged writer. The award honors a Centenary alumnus and English major, Bill Corrington (1932-1988), who was variously an English professor, an attorney in private practice, and, with his wife, Joyce, the head writer for several television series, including Search for Tomorrow and General Hospital. A prolific poet, he also published four novels, two short novels, and three collections of short stories.

In 1991 Eudora Welty became the first recipient of the Corrington Award when she read her short story "A Worn Path" at Centenary's spring Commencement. The Award takes the form of a bronze medal designed by the internationally-exhibited Louisiana sculptor Clyde Connell. The medal depicts two primitive figures, one of them slightly in front of the other, carrying a long object. A presentation box, hand-made by a local craftsperson, accompanies the medal. For more information on the Corrington Award and a full list of past winners, visit centenary.edu/corrington.

 

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