Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
February 11, 2025
The Lynx Books (601 South Main Street)
6 PM
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke came of age working fields, factories, and waters. A tobacco and sweet potato sharecropper by her mid-teens, she worked as a manual laborer into her late twenties, until retraining for former fieldworkers and physical disabilities offered other avenues for expression. For the past thirty years, she’s worked in labor and literary activism, intervention, and bibliotherapy/narrative medicine.
Her books of poetry include The Year of the Rat (1996), Dog Road Woman (1997, winner of the American Book Award and first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), Blood Run (2009), Streaming (2014, winner of the PEN Southwest Award for Poetry), Burn (2017), Look at This Blue (2022, a National Book Award Finalist). Her memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, was published in 2004.
She has written and and directed twenty-eight documentary shorts for the Along the Chaparral: Memorializing the Enshrined project (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Legacy Program, Riverside National Cemetery, UC Riverside), and is at work on a feature-length labor and eco-ethos film, Red Dust: resiliency in the dirty thirties, a new CD, and new poems.
The winner of the Thomas Wolfe Prize & Lecture (UNC, 2023), her other recent awards include the Emory Elliott Book Award (UCR, 2022–23); a California Arts Council Legacy Artist Fellowship (2021−22); the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature (AWP, 2021); induction into the Texas Institute of Letters (2021); the Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (2020); a 2019 Fulbright Scholarship (Montenegro); the First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poet Award (Poetry Center of China, 2018); a Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2017); and the U.S. Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship (2016).
She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Medical and Health Humanities Designated Emphasis, School of Medicine, at the University of California, Riverside.
This reading is free and open to the public.
“We Were in This World” is sponsored by Imagining Climate Change, The UF Department of English Creative Writing Program, and The Lynx Books.