Jeffery Renard Allen

Biography

Jeffery Renard Allen’s most recent novel, Song of the Shank, was a finalist for the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and listed as one of the Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. Allen is also the author of the story collection, Holding Pattern, and the novel, Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for fiction. Other awards include the Whiting Writer’s Award and the Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award. He has been a fellow of the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, BOMB, Antioch Review, African Voices, African American Review, Callaloo, Other Voices, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, as well as anthologies including 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Jam Poetry Anthology, and Step into the World: A Global Anthology of Black Literature. Allen teaches fiction in the low-residency MFA Program.

Research Interest

Poetry