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
. 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. he has worked with a number of emerging writers from the African continent, including
A. Igoni Barrett,
Yewande Omotoso, Samuel Kolawole, and Victor Ehikhmamenor. 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 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. 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. ==Awards==