Claude Wilkinson is a critic, essayist, painter, and poet. His criticism has explored such diverse artists and authors as photographers Maude Schuyler Clay and James Van Der Zee, fiction writers Chinua Achebe, John Cheever, and Flannery O'Connor, playwright Charles Fuller, and poet Etheridge Knight, among others. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, Joy in the Morning, Marvelous Light, World without End, which was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and Soon Done with the Crosses. Wilkinson's poems have five times been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has been a Provost Scholar and also John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Other honors for his poetry include a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and the Whiting Writers' Award. His paintings have been exhibited in numerous invitational, juried, and solo shows across the United States. He has won the W. M. Whittington, Jr. Purchase Award, as well as other prizes for painting.