About Jeffery Renard Allen
Jeffery Renard Allen (born in 1962 in Chicago) is an American poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999) and Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007), and three works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), a story collection Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008) and a second novel, Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2014). In writing about his fiction, reviewers often note his lyrical use of language and his playful use of form to write about African-American life. His poems tend to focus on music, mythology, history, film, and other sources, rather than narrative or autobiographical experiences.
Awards
Allen was awarded The P.E.N. Discovery Prize in 1989. His widely celebrated novel, Rails Under My Back, won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His story collection Holding Pattern won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He has also been awarded a Whiting Award, a support grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital, the Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-First Century Award, Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review, and precise citations from the Society for Midlands Authors and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. He has been a fellow at The Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman 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. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 2015.
