This Sunday, December 6th, Frank X Walker will be discussing his recently published chapbook from Accents Publishing, About Flight, at The Wild Fig. The reading will be the first for the Sunday Salons, a new project by the recently reopened bookstore. The series is designed to move away from traditional literary readings to engage community members and writers in a more interactive space.

About Flight, which was released earlier this year, is a collection of poems that deal with the emotional ramifications of a brother’s addiction to crack cocaine. Randall Horton, author of Pitch Dark Anarchy (Northwestern University Press) and Hook: A Memoir (Augury Books), said, “Frank X Walker gives us the beautiful ugly narrative of a brother who is wrestling with chemical dependency, and losing. The high, in all of its beautiful contradictions takes on the metaphor of flight, and so we soar through the terrible highs and lows of a protagonist who carries his family with him into the den of iniquity.”

Multidisciplinary artist and Danville, Kentucky native, Frank X Walker, is the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, and Professor in the department of English and the African American and Africana Studies Program at the University of Kentucky. The founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of seven collections of poetry including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for best poetry collection. The Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient is the originator of the word, Affrilachia, and wholly committed to deconstructing and forging a new definition of a pluralistic Appalachia.