by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

It’s not uncommon for a poet’s work to be informed by his or her experience as a member of a particular ethnicity or culture or social class. But Caki Wilkinson’s poems are unique for being grounded in her experiencing the world as a woman, not though, as an oppressed feminist, ranter against misogyny, or nurturing motherhood babbler. Said Sewanee Review poetry editor Eric Smith of Wilkinson’s poetry, “She reclaims what it means to be a woman unifying the chaos of human experience in a time when we are so defined by what we are not, by division, rather than unity.” “One on One,” the title of a poem, is also an apt expression for the reader experience for those who take up Wilkinson’s work. When a woman caught up in an unsavory sexual interaction decides it’s time to just get “this over with,” the reader is relieved. Smith credits Wilkinson’s poems with being, “the purest expression of what poetry can be, a participatory art.” The gift of Wilkinson’s poems is she invites readers to feel like the epiphany is theirs. On Oct. 20 and 21, the Review and University will celebrate Wilkinson returning the gift, honoring her with the 2026 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

“She’s not didactic. She’s not lording her intelligence over us,” Smith stressed. Wilkinson’s work resonates with humble brilliance, unexpected genius fomented in unlikely environs, watching soap operas or visiting an exhibit featuring knives, metal buildings, MREs and other survivalist gear. She has authored three poetry collections, “Circles Where the Head Should Be” (2011), “The Wynona Stone Poems” (2015), and “The Survival Expo” (2021). “The Wynona Stone Poems,” which won the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, step out of the crowd for being informed by womanness. Wilkinson wrote the poems during a transitional period in her life, which she described as “There’s the way you see what being a woman is going to be like when you’re growing up and there’s a big shift when you actually enter the working world.” In “The Wynona Stone Poems,” Wilkinson adopts the persona of the fictional character Wynona Stone. “I’m protective of the specific biographical details of my life,” Wilkinson acknowledged. “There was comfort and a kind of power in being able to fictionalize things and to be able to talk about what I wanted to without the feeling of being confessional.” She had been reading the poet Maurice Manning who often spoke in a persona, a technique frequently employed by male poets. Wynona Stone answered the call.

The Wynona poems are by turns hysterical and poignant adolescent rebellion flavored with octogenarian sagacity. In “Higher Education” stuck in “Vocational Equivocation,” eating “coldcuts in bed watching the soaps,” unable to figure out who she wants to be, “Wynona moved back home to find her rhythm,” but what she’d found instead was, “the songs she’d yet to sing always sounded more like her.” Elsewhere, Wynona reflecting on herself observes, “no matter where she is, she’s looking in on someone else’s story.” These two sides of struggling to understand who we are resonate with trademark-Wilkinson ‘we’ve all been there’ insight. Asked if she ever outgrew feeling that way, Wilkinson observed, “There’s a point where you think you’re going to have stuff figured out when you’re a grownup … That’s not how it works. I often don’t think I know what I’m doing. You go through these phases,” she confessed.

The poem “Jock” transitions readers of Wilkinson’s work from “The Wynona Stone Poems” to “The Survival Expo.” In “Jock,” the first poem in “The Survival Expo,” Wilkinson reflects on playing on the girls’ basketball team, the coach “screaming, GET YOUR MAN!” and believing “suffrage meant collective suffering.” These are brave poems. There is no fictional persona. Wilkinson urges the reader to go with her to a county fair, and when she wins a grotesque prize making a basket in a rigged game, the reader cheers, feeling like they won, too.

The collection contains five “Oracle” poems, one in each section. In the poems, each line is an anagram, containing the same letters as the other lines. Wilkinson assigned herself the task when her writing felt “stuck.” “Part of being stuck is there are infinite possibilities,” she insisted. The anagram technique supplied boundaries. “I gave myself the most intense constraint possible.” The result: “the voice felt like it was not quite mine. That was the oracle side.” In “Sinkhole Oracle” the speaker realizes, “alone in my mud pit, into big men—I’m playing me, bound not by time but by type,” and ultimately admits, “I am too dumbly in my being pent.” And aren’t we all at times. What “big men” symbolize isn’t just a girl thing.

“I do a ton of revising,” Wilkinson said. “It takes me a long time to finish a poem.” In form, her poems range from block text, to sonnets, to triplets, and syllabics with three-syllable lines. When putting a collection together, this same attentiveness to detail informs the process. She describes arranging poems within a collection as making a mixtape or music playlist. Juxtaposed poems lend each to the other to say more. In “Obstinate Gospel,” a poem about a suicide with “bloody clothes left to sour in a dark corner of the laundry room,” Wilkinson reflects, “undone with grief a person circles somehow back to reason, deciding … it’s time to throw out anything that won’t come clean.” The companion poem “Hope Comes to Elvis Week” asks, “Can you imagine being loved this much?”

Wilkinson’s family moved from Knoxville to Sewanee when her father received a promotion to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Chattanooga office. Her father, Ty Wilkinson graduated from Sewanee, and the family had visited, but she and her brother had their doubts, “We were like, ‘Are there people there?’” Wilkinson was a rising seventh grader and attended St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School for her middle and high school years. “It was a good, vibrant place to be,” she said. “It changed my life more so than college.” Ten years later, Wilkinson returned to Sewanee to serve on the Sewanee Writers’ Conference staff.

She credits longtime St. Andrew’s-Sewanee teacher Tom Gladstone with nurturing her as a poet and bringing the poems of Mary Oliver, Rilke, “the beats,” and Anne Waldman into her world. “They were way over my head,” she acknowledged. “I was 15. Tom took us seriously at an age when most adults didn’t. I don’t think I would have kept writing poetry without his encouragement.”

Writing poetry began for her in fourth grade, fascinated with Shel Silverstein. “He was funny and dark, and sonically interesting. I wanted to do that.” A reviewer of “The Survival Expo” compared Wilkinson to Gwendolyn Brooks and Wallace Stevens. She was beyond flattered. “Brooks and Stevens are my two favorite 20th century poets. I love them both so much. They’re both poets who think a lot about sound, and they both have characters in their poems,” she said, citing the influence on her work.

The reviewer suggested Wilkinson could be Brooks’ granddaughter, and in that sense, receiving the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry will be a family affair. Brooks received the award in 1992, the sixth awardee. Wilkinson will be the 40th. Physician and poet K. P. A. Taylor established the award in honor of his elder brother, the poet and story writer Conrad Aiken.

The Sewanee Review takes the lead in choosing the awardee, beginning by compiling a list of candidates. “We’re very lucky at the Review in being able to encounter a wide array of writers who submit work to us, who are writing craft essays for us, who we meet through the Sewanee School of Letters and the Sewanee Writers Conference,” said Smith, commenting on the selection process. “What we’re looking for is the same thing we’re looking for in the magazine. Work that excites us, work that makes magic of the mundane.”

Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross cited two changes since he came on board 10 years ago. “I want to make sure we recognize women and poets who represent the broader perspective of American literature, not to redress imbalance, but through the Aiken Taylor to give people a more accurate picture of what American poetry looks like.” The other change is Ross’s intention “to make the Aiken Taylor less of a capstone, and more of an award for remarkable poets in mid-career for whom the money is not just a feather in their cap, but something that allows them to get more work done.”

What’s next for Wilkinson: a novel about a woman basketball player, not surprising from a poet intrigued by adopting personas. Recruited by Rhodes to play basketball, Wilkinson left the program before the first game. “I was tired and overwhelmed,” she confided. “In middle school and high school basketball was what people knew me for. When I quit I felt lost. I wasn’t sure who I was.” The main character in the novel is seven feet tall. Wilkinson is five foot four. In the poem “Hope Brings Back a Half Rack of Ribs,” Wilkinson writes, “We’re all left wondering what we deserve, which twists of luck or penance make a difference.” For Wilkinson, leaving basketball turned out to make that kind of ‘twist of fate’ difference.

Commenting on receiving the Aiken Taylor Award, Wilkinson said, “I’ve never expected that kind of recognition. I’m so grateful! I had no idea I was even being considered.” Her readers are cheering from the sidelines.