Jeffery Renard Allen
Biography of Jeffery Renard Allen
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.
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