JUSTICE UNBOUND BOOK CLUB

All are welcome to join Legal Aid Society’s book club, Justice Unbound. We believe that stories have the power to create empathy and connect communities. Our book club aims to explore issues related to civil legal justice, better understand the challenges facing low-income communities, and inspire creative solutions to complicated and systemic issues.

Benefits of Joining

  • 20% discount on all book club books at Carmichaels Bookstore

  • Invitation to our Books and Breakfast series (our book discussion events)

  • Connection with a community of individuals passionate about civil legal justice

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Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson is a lyrical blend of memoir and cookbook that reveals the untold legacy of Black Appalachians. Wilkinson, an O. Henry Prize–winning writer and former Kentucky poet laureate, revisits her family’s history through the foods that sustained five generations of Black women in Appalachia.

While baking her grandmother’s jam cake, Wilkinson felt her ancestors’ presence—her “kitchen ghosts”—guiding her hands. Their legacy is captured in nearly forty family recipes, including Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, and Praisesong Biscuits. Through these dishes, she honors both the land and the women who nourished their community for over a century.

Weaving recipes, family photos, and lyrical storytelling, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts is both a culinary tribute and a cultural history. Wilkinson shows how food preserves memory, identity, and the power of belonging.

About 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 culinary 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. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky where she is a Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor.

save the date

Lunch & Lit

Thursday, December 11th from 11:30 AM to 1 PM at Legal Aid Society (416 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd., Ste. 300)

To celebrate Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, we will hold a potluck lunch for all those who participate in Justice Unbound. Bring your own family favorites or try a receipt from the book.

Join us for the companion event where we dive deeper into the book and it’s themes as they related to poverty in our community, legal aid, and the role of the legal system.

RSVP TO LUNCH & LIT

Past Reading

  • MAID by Stephanie Land

    March 2025

    “I had to stop hoping for someone to come along and love me. I had to do it myself, ducking my head and barreling through anything life brought. I felt like sitting down meant I wasn't doing enough - like the sort of lazy welfare recipient I was assumed to be.”

  • Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

    October 2024

    “Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”

  • The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

    “Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they'd never live long enough or have the strength to find it.”

  • Other Suggested Reading

    View from the Bench by Judge McKay Chauvin

    “I Left Poverty After Writing ‘Maid.’ But Poverty Never Left Me.” By Stephanie Land.

Thanks to Carmichael’s Bookstore for offering all Justice Unbound Book Club members 20% our book selections!

Simply let the cashier know you are a member of Justice Unbound Book Club at check out.