Reckoning with the Past: The Historical Poetry of Frank X Walker

Medgar Evers, civil rights organizer. Isaac Murphy, one of the greatest jockeys of all time. York, enslaved explorer on the Corps of Discovery expedition. These three pivotal figures are brought together in Frank X Walker's body of work.

Known for coining the term Affrilachia and cofounding the Affrilachian Poets, acclaimed writer and activist Frank X Walker challenges dominant historical narratives and renders "the invisible visible" through his persona poetry. His extensive creative output is informed by his own experiences as well as figures important to US history. While these figures are eras apart, Walker finds the shared undercurrents of their lives, exploring themes of gender, family, and race in each collection. His poetry joins in a deep tradition of Black American literature that exhibits both a concern for historical truth-telling and a powerful empathy that looks to the future.

This first book-length study of an Affrilachian poet examines five of Walker's collections to highlight how his poems on York, Isaac Murphy, and Medgar Evers address and bridge the disconnect between past and present. Author Kristine Yohe pays deep attention to Walker's craft and emphasizes the pursuit of social justice and racial reconciliation underpinning his work. In this way, Reckoning with the Past not only adds to the well-deserved recognition of Walker's poetry but also brings more awareness and respect to the lives of others whose voices are essential to the American story.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Reckoning with the Past will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.

Kristine Yohe is a professor of English at Northern Kentucky University, where she has taught since 1997 and where her teaching and scholarship focus on Black American literature, especially Toni Morrison, Frank X Walker, and the Affrilachian Poets collective. She received her BA in English from Emory University and her MA and PhD, specializing in African American literature, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2005, she served as director for the Toni Morrison Society Fourth Biennial Conference, held in greater Cincinnati and at NKU, in conjunction with Morrison’s Margaret Garner opera. Kris is currently serving as a board member for the Toni Morrison Society and for the Harriet Beecher Stowe House.

Her publications include essays on history in Morrison’s Beloved, as well as chapters in two
books about Margaret Garner. Her article about Walker’s Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of
Medgar Evers was published in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters in Fall
2024. Kris’s book, Reckoning With the Past: The Historical Poetry of Frank X Walker, will be
published on 27 January 2026 from the University Press of Kentucky. In addition, she is
coediting, with Zanice Bond of Tuskegee University, the forthcoming book Teaching Affrilachia:
Cultivating Community and Culture, also with the University Press of Kentucky.

The first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate, Frank X Walker is Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington where he founded pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. He has published eleven collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded an NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of a Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, which he adapted for stage. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker, a Danville native, coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. A Cave Canem fellow, his honors also include a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. His most recent collection is Load in Nine Times, winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award.