Medgar Evers, civil rights organizer. Isaac Murphy, one of the greatest jockeys of all time. York, enslaved explorer on the Corps of Discovery expedition. These three pivotal figures are brought together in Frank X Walker's body of work. Known for coining the term Affrilachia and cofounding the Affrilachian Poets, acclaimed writer and activist Frank X Walker challenges dominant historical narratives and renders "the invisible visible" through his persona poetry. His extensive creative output is informed by his own experiences as well as figures important to US history. While these figures are eras apart, Walker finds the shared undercurrents of their lives, exploring themes of gender, family, and race in each collection. His poetry joins in a deep tradition of Black American literature that exhibits both a concern for historical truth-telling and a powerful empathy that looks to the future.  This first book-length study of an Affrilachian poet examines five of Walker's collections to highlight how his poems on York, Isaac Murphy, and Medgar Evers address and bridge the disconnect between past and present. Author Kristine Yohe pays deep attention to Walker's craft and emphasizes the pursuit of social justice and racial reconciliation underpinning his work. In this way, Reckoning with the Past not only adds to the well-deserved recognition of Walker's poetry but also brings more awareness and respect to the lives of others whose voices are essential to the American story. "Yohe reads Walker's historical poems as if they were one long poem that celebrates and brings to light the forgotten contributions of African Americans in the long history of the United States. She reads them with and against the epic tradition and notes how Walker's use of the persona poem, deeply situated within a longer African American literary tradition, helps him reckon with the past, resurrect these voices, speak to the present, and envision the future."―Jeremy Paden, Affrilachian poet and author of World as Sacred Burning Heart "Kristine Yohe's Reckoning with the Past: The Historical Poetry of Frank X Walker offers a bold and incisive exploration of Frank X Walker's transformative poetics. This pathbreaking study reveals how Walker's historical verse radically reframes African American memory, reclaims erased histories, and crafts a visionary model of healing through art and ancestral witness."―Keith B. Mitchell, coeditor of Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise "Yohe shows how Frank X Walker's persona poems enliven overlooked histories with such richness that we feel the ache of what we never knew. She demonstrates that his work models the careful craft of wondering―teaching us to imagine missing lives with ethical attentiveness and to long for what else might be restored."―Michelle S. Hite, author of the foreword to Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers "If Walker's historical persona poems revise a bad history, Kristine Yohe's writing is an aerial shot of the scenes of the crimes, as well as moments of redemption that witness and art can make. Reckoning with the Past is a vital part of the cycle of activism, art, and scholarship."―Keith S. Wilson, Affrilachian poet and author of the National Poetry Series–winning Games for Children "Just as Frank X Walker has lent voice to some of those excluded from American and Kentucky history, we must amplify his own voice as we teach and explore Appalachian literature. Reckoning with the Past is immensely important because Walker's work is immensely important."―Sylvia Shurbutt, editor of Silas House: Exploring an Appalachian Writer's Work Kristine Yohe is professor of English at Northern Kentucky University and serves as a board member for the Toni Morrison Society. Her teaching and scholarship focus on Black American literature, especially the Affrilachian Poets collective. Yohe's work has appeared in Callaloo : A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters , The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison , and Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner , among other publications.