Medallion for Intellectual Achievement

With the Medallion for Intellectual Achievement, UK Libraries recognizes a Kentucky resident whose accomplishments in the fields of science, literature, art, or philanthropy have made a profound impact on the Commonwealth and represent the pinnacle of creative or scholarly thought.

The award is presented during the annual UK Libraries National Advisory Board’s Spring Celebration. View a list of all past award recipients and learn more about our most recent winners below.

Award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet Crystal Wilkinson currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky, where she is the Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor of English. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, and raised in Indian Creek, Kentucky, Wilkinson’s writing explores Black Appalachia and the rural South. Her genre-spanning work includes three novels, Blackberries, Blackberries (2000), Water Street (2002), and The Birds of Opulence (2016); a book of poetry, Perfect Black (2021); and a culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts (2024). The Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021-23, Wilkinson is recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2025.

The Stan and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science, Dr. W. Brent Seales has been teaching and mentoring students at the University of Kentucky since 1991. Seales’ innovative research has led to the invention of “virtual unwrapping,” allowing previously unreadable materials from the ancient world to be identified and analyzed. Seales has been awarded competitive extramural funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the United Kingdom's Arts & Humanities Research Council. He is the Principal Investigator on the EduceLab project, a first-of-its-kind world class heritage science lab to be built at the University of Kentucky.

Dr. Paul Evans Holbrook, Jr. has served as the Director of the King Library Press since 1988, and with five decades of experience in the book arts, he carries forward the tradition and spirit of fine printing that has long been alive in Lexington. A man of many talents, Holbrook taught philosophy, ethics, and comparative religion at UK and Midway College for 25 years, and has been active in the Episcopal Diocese of Lexington since his ordination to the diaconate in 1975. He currently serves on the boards of the Kentucky Ballet Theatre, the Warwick Foundation, Lexington Directions, and the Kentucky Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters, and is an Honorary Gaines Fellow. In 2006, Holbrook became a co-owner and operator of Stella’s Kentucky Deli, where he serves in various capacities, including as the baker of Stella’s pies.