Books

From former poet laureate of Kentucky and founder of the Affrilachian Poets, a collection of historical poetry that gives voice to Black Civil War soldiers.

For decades, Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry: from Medgar Evers in Turn Me Loose, winner of the NAACP Award; to York, the enslaved explorer who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, in Buffalo Dance, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers―including his own ancestors―who enlisted in the Union Army in exchange for emancipation. Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slaveowners and prominent historical figures―including Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and Margaret Garner―into a wide-ranging series of “persona poems” imbued with atmospheric imagery and brimming with indomitable spirit. Evoking the pride and perseverance of formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: “I, am America’s promise, my mother’s song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream.”

Load in Nine Times is available for pre-order at Liveright Publishing today.

Load in Nine Times
(Liveright, 2024)
ISBN-10: 1324094931
ISBN-13: 978-1324094937
Hardcover, $26.99

"Frank X Walker is known for his poignant historical persona poems, but in Love House, he not only brings the collective past back to us in living color, but these poems delve into the sacred personal, the psychohistory of what it means to be father, son, husband, brother, Black. Up close and personal, he writes poems that are on a pendulum, bringing us through the intersection of what is deeply personal in the intimate glances of the depths of our insides; what we find in birdsong and the garden, the devastation of a flood and erosion, then back to the passing of his closest loved ones, what it means to age, violence and the abuse of power, what it means to be human." —Crystal Wilkinson, author of Perfect Black

Love House is available at Accents Publishing today.

Love House
(Accents Publishing, 2023)
ISBN: 978-1-961127-03-6
Softcover, $19.99

"Frank X Walker's ode to Affrilachia paints a rich portrait of Black life, both past and present, in the Appalachian region of the United States. With each page offering a peek into lesser-known artistic, cultural, and historical identities, a helpful glossary at the back of the book opens the door further. Plain-spoken text, good for young readers, is balanced by bright and energetic illustrations that ring of the region's colorful contributions to American life." —Nansubuga Nagadya Isdahl, author of Nelson Mandela and Sing to the Moon (This text refers to the hardcover edition.)

A is for Affrilachia is available at The University Press of Kentucky today.

A is for Affrilachia
(The University Press of Kentucky, 2023)
ASIN: B09RGMRN5C
Hardcover, $19.95

"Professor Frank X Walker has yet again used his superpowers to insert a conscience into the tumultuous cacophony that is social media. His latest series of poems debuted in our news feeds, week after week, speaking truth to the tangled web of perspectives splattered across our digital landscape. By spreading light in our darkest times, our Professor X speaks to a class of students, who have been mutated by the pandemic, by political doublespeak and visions of violence and brutality from around the world. With each new line of poetry, Our Professor X reads our minds and speaks to our hearts. Catharsis and metamorphosis are experienced simultaneously for the reader. Thank you for sharing your words." —Willard C. Watson III

Masked Man, Black is available at Accents Publishing today.

Masked Man, Black
(Accents Publishing, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1-936628-59-9
Paperback, $16.00

Frank X Walker's tenth book of poetry focuses on the circle of life and love. Delves into gifts and loses. Brings unhealed generational relationships into the light. This is a book of saying goodbye to a father and celebrating the new life of a son. Deeply moving, unforgettable poems.

Last Will, Last Testament is available at Accents Publishing today.

Last Will, Last Testament
(Accents Publishing, 2019)
ISBN: 978-1-936628-49-0
Paperback, $16.00

"In every stanza of this evocative and revelatory gospel, the inimitable X teaches us "Something important about holding on, something more about letting go." He leans hard into the fierce, achingly familiar and sometimes fractured realities of the black-lived life, and under his deft touch they unreel as stark cinema—character-driven, rich with sensory, imbibed with their own selfish music and utterly, utterly memorable." —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art, Northwestern University Press

Ink Stains & Watermarks is available on Duncan Hill Press today.

Ink Stains & Watermarks: New and Uncollected Poems
(Duncan Hall Press, 2017)
ISBN-10: 978-0-9790724-3-7

"Up until this point in American history, no poet has written an honest and believable lament about the crippling effects from the tornado swirl of a crack pipe, how a little rock being melted between thin mesh screen creates pallid smoke: a monster, a slave to the white lady that is cocaine. In About Flight, 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." —Randall Horton, author of Pitch Dark Anarchy & Hook: A Memoir

About Flight is available on Amazon today.

About Flight
(Accents Publishing, 2015)
ISBN-10: 1936628368
ISBN-13: 978-1936628360

As a whole, Frank X. Walker’s “The Affrilachian Sonnets” is the perfect combination of the aesthetic and the political. These are socially significant poems that are painstakingly crafted by a man who loves beauty as well as social change. In these poems, Walker merges the lyric intensity of Komunyakaa with the myth-making energy of Robert Frost. These poems transcend traditional notions of Appalachia and hold forth the promise, the triumph, and the necessity of a new and diverse Appalachia. —Art Cox, The Journal News

The Affilachian Sonnets is available on Carmichael's Bookstore today.

The Affilachian Sonnets
(Larkspur Press, 2016)

Around the void left by the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, the poems in this collection speak, unleashing the strong emotions both before and after the moment of assassination. Poems take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives. Except for the book's title,"Turn me loose," which were his final words, Evers remains in this collection silent. Yet the poems accumulate facets of the love and hate with which others saw this man, unghosting him in a way that only imagination makes possible.

Turn Me Loose is available on Amazon today.

Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers
(University of Georgia Press, 2013)
ISBN-10: 0-8203454-1-5
ISBN-13: 978-0820345413

In this new collection of poems, Frank X Walker immerses himself in the story of legendary African American jockey Isaac Burns Murphy (1861-1896). The son of a slave, Murphy rose to the top of thoroughbred racing to become the most successful Jockey in America. Through poetic imagination, Walker gives us the voices of Isaac Murphy and his wife Lucy, his trainer Eli Jordan, and his parents James and America Burns. Through their words we follow Murphy's dramatic Journey to become America's most celebrated black jockey.

Issac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride is available on Amazon today.

Issac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride
(Old Cove Press, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0-9675424-3-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-9675424-3-0
Paperback, $16.00

A sequel to the award-winning Buffalo Dance, Frank X Walker's When Winter Come: The Ascension of York is a dramatic reimagining of Lewis and Clark's legendary exploration of the American West. Grounded in the history of the famous trip, Walker's vibrant account allows York — little more than a forgotten footnote in traditional narratives — to embody the full range of human ability, knowledge, emotion, and experience. Knowledge of the seasons unfolds to York "like a book," and he "can read moss, sunsets, the moon, and a mare's foaling time with a touch."

During the journey, York forges a spiritual connection and shares sensual delights with a Nez Perce woman, and Walker's poems capture the profound feelings of love and loss on each side of this ill-fated meeting of souls. As the perspectives of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and others in the party emerge, Walker also gives voice to York's knife, his hunting shirt, and the river waters that have borne thousands of travelers before and after the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The alternately heartbreaking and uplifting poems in When Winter Come are told from multiple perspectives and rendered in vivid detail. When Winter Come exalts the historical persona of a slave and lifts the soul of a man; York ascends out of his chains, out of oblivion, and into flight.

The degree to which university professors have staked their academic lives and intellectual selves on every accented syllable of dead white men, having diagramed their “brilliant” intentions and held it up as evidence that poetry is the caviar on the literary menu, has helped carve out an elitist mystique and ruined many a promising young poet. In the pages that follow, we offer a counter argument: that poetry is bread. That it is whole grain sustenance and comes in all colors, ethnicities, sizes, genders, and sexual preferences. It is not just the leather-bound private joy of scholars, but new and naked and pouring out of the stomachs and hearts of emerging and established writers all over this country.

America needs poetry more than it needs prisons; ill-conceived government policies, inadequate schools, political spin, or exit polls. Poetry, when used correctly, is the most democratic thing we own. It belongs to the people. It is for the people and it rings truest when written by the people.

You probably won’t find these poets in your syllabus, though there are more prize-winning writers in these pages than you will find in many university English departments. But wherever you can find a table or a hungry mouth; wherever people need nothing else with their soup but homemade biscuits, cornbread, tortillas, challah, or frybread, fresh out of the oven, I hope you will find this book being read aloud or passed hand to hand with love, with appreciation for genuine solutions for real hunger.

America! What's My Name? is available on Amazon today.

America! What's My Name? (Wind Publications, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1893239632
ISBN-13: 978-1893239630
Paperback, $15.50

This powerful collection of poems from award-winning poet Frank X Walker continues the autobiograhical, political and literary journey of Affrilachia, his groundbreaking book of poems about growing up black in the Appalachian south (Old Cove Press, 2000). In Black Box he offers the reader 68 new poems -- written with passion, clarity and emotional honesty -- that illuminate experiences of race, love, social justice, family, identity and place.

Black Box is available on Amazon and Old Cove Press today.

Black Box Poems (Old Cove Press, 2005)
ISBN-10: 0-9675424-1-3
ISBN-13: 978-0967542416
Paperback, $15.50

Winner of the 35th Annual Lillian Smith Book Award, 2004

A BookSense 76 Spring 2004 Top 10 Poetry Book!

This collection of persona poems tells the story of the infamous Lewis & Clark expedition from the point of view of Clark's personal slave, York. The poems form a narrative of York's inner and outer journey, before, during and after the expedition — a journey from slavery to freedom, from the plantation to the great northwest, from servant to soul yearning to be free.

Over the course of the saga and through the poems, we are treated to subtle and overt commentaries on literacy, slavery, native Americans, buffalo, the environment, and more. Though Buffalo Dance purposely references historic accounts and facts, it is fictionalized poetry, and Frank X Walker's rare blend of history and art breathes life into an important but overlooked historical figure.

Now in its eighth printing, Frank X Walker's pathbreaking book of poems Affrilachia is a classic of Appalachian and African-American literature. Walker created the word "Affrilachia" to help make visible the experience of African-Americans living in the rural and Appalachian South. The book is widely used in classrooms and is one of the foundational works of the Affrilachian Poets, a community of writers offering fresh ways to think about diversity in the Appalachian region and beyond.

Affrilachia is available on Amazon and Old Cove Press today.

Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000)
ISBN-10: 0-9675424-0-5
ISBN-13: 978-0967542409 • $14.50