The residents of Water Street are hardworking, God-fearing people who live in a seemingly safe and insulated neighborhood within a small Kentucky town: "Water Street is a place where mothers can turn their backs to flip a pancake or cornmeal hoecake on the stove and know our children are safe." But all is not as it seems as the secret lives of neighbors and friends are revealed in interconnected tales of love, loss, truth, and tragedy.
Water Street, by Crystal Wilkinson
CRYSTAL WILKINSON, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a memoir; Perfect Black, a collection of poems; and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence , Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. A former poet laureate of Kentucky, her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.