Jeffery Renard Allen

Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist.

Jeffery Renard Allen was born in 1962 in Chicago, and raised on the South Side of Chicago, a neighborhood that he says informs the setting of his first novel Rails Under My Back and the stories in his collection Holding Pattern.

For Allen, the 1980s in Chicago and other black communities across America represented an "apocalyptic moment" with the introduction of crack cocaine, the violence and other forms of destruction and devastation it brought, experiences that he feels have been underrepresented in literary fiction.

Allen attended public schools in Chicago, then completed all of his university education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he holds a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing).

Jeffery Renard Allen was Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York and a faculty member in the writing program at The New School and in the low residency MFA writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

He has taught in the writing program at Columbia University and in many writers’ conferences and programs around the world including: Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars Program in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Kwani? LitFest in Kenya, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, North Country Retreat for Writers of Color, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Workshop in Lagos, the American Writers Festival in Singapore, and VONA.

He is the fiction director for the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers Colony.

He is the co-founder and president of the Pan African Literary Forum, an international, non-profit literary organization that aids to help writers on the African continent.

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, St. Petersburg Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Writer's Digest, and XCP:Cross Cultural Poetics.

Allen was awarded The P.E.N. Discovery Prize in 1989.

His 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 is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999) and Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007), and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), the story collection Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008) a second novel, Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2014), and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories” (Graywolf Press, 2023).

He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son” (Atria, 2023).

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 special citations from the Society for Midlands Authors and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation.

In 2006, he taught for the Kwani? Literary festival in Nairobi, Kenya.

In the essay "Water Brought Us" published in Callaloo in 2007, Allen examines how his travels on the African continent were reshaping his thoughts about race, slavery, and place.

With fellow author Arthur Flowers, he founded the Pan African Literary Forum, which held an international writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, in July 2008 that featured more than one hundred participants.

The following fall he became deathly ill with malaria (and resulting complications) he had contracted while in West Africa, and spent more than six weeks in the hospital.

(Source: Minna Proctor in the introduction to the Spring 2009 issue of The Literary Review.) In August 2012, Allen taught for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Farafina Trust Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria.

That same year, he also served as the program director for literature for the Jahazi Literary and Jazz Festival in Zanzibar.

In his work with the Norman Mailer Center's Writers Colony, he has worked with a number of emerging writers from the African continent, including A. Igoni Barrett, Yewande Omotoso, Samuel Kolawole, and Victor Ehikhmamenor.

His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, Chicago Noir, Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, and Best African American Fiction 2010.

He is presently at work on a collection of stories and novellas called Radar Country that in part uses his travels on the African continent to frame an exploration of subjects such as place, race, religion and faith, music and culture, identity, and family.

Allen has worked with developing writers around the African continent.

Under the auspices of the Pan African Literary Forum, in 2012 Allen organized a national reading tour for South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile.

The Pan African Literary Forum has also collaborated on readings and panel discussions at The New School and for the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College.

In subsequent interviews, he has talked about how the time he spent on the Swahili islands of Lamu (off the Kenyan coast) and Zanzibar in East Africa helped shape his creation of the fictional island called Edgemere in his 2014 novel Song of the Shank.

He was the guest editor for the Spring 2014 issue of Kweli Literary Magazine, as well as the Winter 2009 issue of The Literary Review, which focused on emerging writers from the African continent.

He was also the guest poetry editor for the Spring 2014 issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal, a special section honoring the work of blues poet Sterling Plumpp.

In June 2023, Graywolf Press published Allen's latest book, "Fat Time and Other Stories."

Allen is the co-author of the memoir "An Unspeakable Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building a Better Future for My Son" with Leon Ford.

The book was published by Atria in June 2023.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 2015.

Allen is an advisory editor for the journal Black Renaissance Noire, which is published under the auspices of New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs.