“The prodigiously talented Jeffrey Renard Allen is without question one of our most important writers.”  
—Junot Diaz


photo credit: Miriam Berkley

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999), and a collection of short stories, Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008) He is also the author of a widely celebrated and influential novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, and a support grant from Creative Capital, and the 2003 Charles Angoff award for fiction from The Literary Review. He has been at fellow at The Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Born in Chicago, he holds a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has also taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. And he is the founder and director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a non-profit organization which serves writers and which will hold an annual writers’ conference, the first to open in Ghana in the summer of 2008.

A resident of Far Rockaway, Queens, Allen is presently at work on Talking Talk, a book of interviews and conversations with fiction writers of African descent from around the world, and the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom. The novel will be published in 2010.

Holding Pattern
Click to order via Graywolf Press or  Amazon

Fiction
256 pages
paperback original (978-1-55595-509-8)
Graywolf Press
September 2008

Read an Excerpt from Holding Pattern, from “Bread and the Land”

The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies on to your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.

The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s reserve. In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in his mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.

Praise for Holding Pattern:

“Subtly otherworldly, each tale is electric with the rising tension that proceeds stormy weather; each tale is a veritable boxing match, as characters trapped in impossible situations feint, jab, and retreat.”
—BOOKLIST (STARRED REVIEW)

“Allen delivers striking prose.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“The prodigiously talented Jeffrey Renard Allen is without question one of our most important writers. His novel, Rails Under My Back, kicked ass, and these tough beautiful stories are a gift. You cannot finish this collection without being dazzled by Allen’s manifold talents.”
—JUNOT DÍAZ

“Jeffery Renard Allen’s poetic vision is stunning, tragic, wildly funny and most of all alive. He is the rare writer who, by creating a wholly unique and surreal dreamscape, illuminates, illuminates human reality on the deepest level. He is also the rare writer who borrows from no one and doesn’t pander to anyone.”
—MARY GAITSKILL

“The best stories in this collection linger—haunted, unique, disturbing—the voices throughout are original, demanding—talk that walks.”
—JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

Rails Under My Back
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Fiction
352 pages
hardcover (978-0-37424-626-6)
FSG, 2000

In this multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel, Jeffery Renard Allen tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: these are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience during the past half-century.

Rails Under My Back ranges, as the characters do, from the City, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. One image that holds the family together is that of the railroads taking them from place to place-from the South to the North, from their living to their working quarters, from one form of bondage or freedom to another. The McShans and the Joneses somehow prevail, in their bigger-than-life way, and their story has extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power. Allen's voice is unforgettable.

Praise for Rails Under My Back:

“A novel of immense power… If there is justice in the literary world, this book will make a large mark on the first decade in a new century of American letters.”
—VINCE PASSARO, ELLE

“Big, ambitious, picaresque, and beautiful… a book for anybody who cares about serious fiction.”
— SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

 

Stellar Places
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Paperback: 170 pages
Publisher: Asphodel Press; 1 edition (February 28, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 155921385X
ISBN-13: 978-1559213851

Allen's extraordinary verbal energy is contagious to the point of shouting.

The drive of Jeffery Renard Allen's new poems comes from music; blues, jazz, and even hip-hop. The idiom, which draws on African and Caribbean myth, African-American folk lore, street talk and night whispers, is as capable of meditative reflection and cultural speculation as it is of matters of self and identity. These is an awareness throughout these poems of Black history, of "the shackles of the old," and of the confining urban present: "the shackles of the new." All this is combined with a sense of the saving graces in poetry, music, art, and film; of vision, dance and song.

Praise for Stellar Places:

"Allen fuses intellect with images. Our language sparkles in his hands. His poems are word sculptures on paper. Allen seems to be following the tradition of Robert Hayden, Sterling Brown and Melvin Tolson. It's the place to be." —E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African American Resource Center, Howard University

"One minute, you're bleeding metaphysical beneath a streetlight, the next you're ancestral, breaking "into an unguarded cloudbank," spilling free. So many of these poems consecrate and dignify American lives. So many turn up kinship, so many turn perception into song." —Major Jackson

"These are not mere poems, but blues-rooted celebrations and revelations that bristle with love of language. These poems twist and shimmy to the rhythms of life, as if trumpeted from the bandstand by a raging horn section. Allen's "jazzifications" resonate with the raw power of those fully engaged in establishing their humanity, yet burst off the page with that noisily embraceable joy of self-love and discovery no amount of evil can obliterate--a rush!"  —Wanda Coleman

Harbors and Spirits
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Paperback: 158 pages
Publisher: Moyer Bell (January 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 155921208X
ISBN-13: 978-1559212083
Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 5.6

Poet, novelist and critic, Jeffery Renard Allen brings a number of characteristics to his first collectional of poems. He adapts jazz and blues forms to lyric poetry and uses a variety of cultural sources to draw together materials that exist in a shared mythology. The result has the directness and clarity of an African-American Homeric hymn. Rich in musicality, Allen's work offers an extraordinary breadth of reference and discovery.

Related links

Graywolf Press
http://www.graywolfpress.org

Pan African Literary Forum
http://www.panafricanliteraryforum.org/