Frank X Walker was approaching middle age when he finally acknowledged his calling as a writer.
Walker, 63, had been writing since he was a boy, creating his own comic books. The whole time he was earning a living as a salesman, a visual artist and an arts administrator, he spent his free time writing poems and stories.
“But I never dreamed about being a writer,” he said in an interview. “What little I knew about writing convinced me that I wouldn’t eat, that it was a poor choice of professions.”
Walker eventually changed his mind. He is now a creative writing professor at the University of Kentucky and the author of 13 poetry collections and a children’s book. He has adapted his work for the stage, edited two poetry collections, and helped create educational and video resources for public television.
Walker received the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry in 2005, and in 2013-2014, he became Kentucky’s first African American poet laureate. He received the NAACP Image Award for Poetry in 2014, the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004, the Thomas D. Clark Literary Award for Excellence in 2006 and many other honors. He is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture.
Born Frank Wesley Walker Jr. in Danville, he graduated from Danville High School, winning awards in creative writing and visual art. But when he enrolled in the University of Kentucky, he majored in electrical engineering. It seemed like a good career path, but he soon realized he had no passion for it.
Walker sat out a semester of classes because a business he started that sold paraphernalia to fraternities and sororities was doing so well that he didn’t have time for both. When his mother found out, she shamed him into returning to UK. He switched his major to journalism and later to English. His passion was writing.
“I took every creative writing class I could,” said Walker, who studied under then-UK professor Percival Everett, whose novel James won the 2024 National Book Award, and Gurney Norman, a 2019 Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame inductee.
“Gurney was the best writing teacher and humanitarian and community activist model for me that I could have possibly had,” Walker said. “Being in Gurney’s orbit, he had me reading so much. He really invested in my development as a literary person.”
As an undergrad, Walker wore eyeglasses like Malcolm X, whom he once portrayed in a play. “I also had hair then,” he said. “I had a certain political edginess about me, and all my friends just called me X. It was an honor.” He started using Frank X Walker as his pen name and eventually changed his name legally.
After graduation, Walker said the Knoxville News Sentinel wanted to hire him as a feature writer, but he felt uneasy about becoming that newsroom’s only Black journalist. Instead, he accepted an offer to direct UK’s Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center.
“By this time, I had started thinking of myself as a writer—not a poet, but a writer,” Walker said. “And then Nikky Finney showed up.”
Finney, who won the National Book Award for poetry in 2011, came to UK in 1989 as a visiting writer and then spent two decades on UK’s English faculty. She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2021.
Finney and several other local Black writers started gathering with Walker at the cultural center on Monday evenings to talk about writing and share their work. The group evolved into the Affrilachian Poets, which took its name from Walker’s first book of poetry, Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000). He coined the word to describe the rich but often-ignored history and culture of Black people in Appalachia.
Walker still wasn’t ready to call himself a writer. The cultural center job set him on a career path in arts administration. He went to Purdue University to serve as assistant director of its Black cultural center, then returned to Kentucky to become vice president of the Kentucky Center for the Arts and director of the Governor’s School for the Arts.
“All that work at the governor’s school helping other people realize their artistic output … reminded me how comfortable I was in that space,” he said. “I was a good administrator, but it also woke up the artist in me.”
Walker had written two books of poetry by this time, “but I knew I had more books in me.” He also knew that if he wanted a university teaching job, he would need at least a master of fine arts degree. Spalding University in Louisville was then starting what has become an acclaimed low-residency MFA program in creative writing, and Walker was in its first graduating class, as were Crystal Wilkinson and Silas House.
Eastern Kentucky University hired Walker and House to start a creative writing MFA program there, but neither stayed long. Walker won the $75,000 Lannan Literary Fellowship, giving him enough money to write for a time. Then he took part-time teaching jobs at the University of Louisville and Transylvania University before joining Northern Kentucky University’s faculty.
In 2010, UK recruited Walker to teach in its Africana Studies program. He has been there ever since as a professor of Africana studies and creative writing. His wife, Dr. Shauna M. Morgan, is a poet and associate professor in those programs.
“Teaching also was something I never dreamt of doing,” Walker said. “But because I had great teachers, I think I passively learned what a good teacher was. Today, I think I’m a better teacher than a writer.”
Much of Walker’s poetry involves telling the history of Black Kentuckians through poetry, a story form exemplified in his latest book, Load in Nine Times (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2024). Its poems are narratives about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction based on historic artifacts of Black Kentuckians. The Frazier History Museum in Louisville is exhibiting 18 of those poems with artifacts that inspired them in its exhibit The Commonwealth: Divided We Fall.
For Walker, studying history is a way of understanding the present. He thinks a good poem evokes emotions in readers—and leaves them with a memorable punch at the end. “It’s really important to me that the reader feel something,” he said.
Walker has spent years writing and rewriting a novel he hopes to publish eventually. He also is finishing two poetry manuscripts. One is about a century of racism through the lens of golf. The other is a third book about York, an enslaved African American who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their “Voyage of Discovery” through western North America from 1804-1806.
“After decades of believing that I wanted to be something else—even though I was already writing and making art—I thought that pursuing a dream meant it had to be hard, “ Walker said. “Writing was always easy for me. It was pleasure; it was not work.”
