Allison Hedge Coke

She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.

• Name — Allison Adelle Hedge Coke • Born — 4 August 1958 • Birthplace — Amarillo, Texas, United States • Occupation — Poet, writer, artist, performer, filmmaker, educator, professional organizer • Genre — Poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, script, lyrics • Notable Works — Dog Road Woman; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer; Off-Season City Pipe; Blood Run Streaming • Awards — American Book Award, King/Chavez/Parks Award • Website — http: allisonhedgecoke.com/ http: rdkla.com/

Coke was born in Amarillo, Texas, to a family she says were of French-Canadian, Alsatian, English, Irish, Welsh, Portuguese, Cherokee, Huron, and Muscogee descent. She self-identifies as Native American despite not being enrolled in any Native tribe, and wrote her paternal grandfather Vaughn "refused tribal enrollment for himself and his children" to protest the "diabolical Dawe's Act". The Tribal Alliance Against Frauds published her genealogy back to 1712 showing no Native American or First Nations ancestors. Hedge Coke had a very non-traditional childhood educational experience, dropping out of high school to work in the crop fields to provide for herself. She then completed her GED at age 16 where she shortly after began taking community education classes at North Carolina State University, studying photography, traditional arts, and writing. Hedge Coke studied performance, directing and tech at Estelle Harmon's Actors Workshop, and went on to earn an AFAW in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA summer exchange fellow at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program), and an MFA in poetry from Vermont College.

She held a National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor/Writer appointment for Hartwick College (2004). She is an original and emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute Think-Tank, a MacDowell Colony for the Arts Fellow, a Hawthorden Castle Fellow, a Soul Mountain Fellow, a Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities Fellow, a Lannan Foundation residency fellow, and a current University of Nebraska–Lincoln Center for Great Plains Studies Fellow (flagship campus). She served as the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English, and as an Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Writing in the English Department of the University of Nebraska at Kearney (2007–2012) and University of Nebraska low-residency MFA program (2007–current). She was visiting Artist of the University of Central Oklahoma (2012–2014), and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (2014). She has also served as a Visiting Writer for the University of California Riverside (2014) and University of California Riverside–Palm Desert (2008), and taught for Northern Michigan University, the University of Arkansas, Lenoir-Rhyne University, Kilian College, and the University of Sioux Falls. Hedge Coke is a founding faculty member of the low residency Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing and Publishing (2015–), teaches for Oklahoma City University's Red Earth MFA (2016–), and is visiting faculty for the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She has directed the annual Literary Sandhill Crane Retreat, in conjunction with her studies in migration patterning influence on flyway communities, since 2007. Hedge Coke is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Hedge Coke's work Blood Run, a free verse poetry collection of 66 poems, was inspired by the traditions of the Native American Mound Builders and their earthworks. Blood Run revives the history of the sites giving profound voice to humans, animals, plants and structures, also with political-ecological hope for the future to preserve ancient spiritual places. The poems show a mathematical patterning based on the numbers four, three and seven and on the sequence of the first 24.primes. In Hedge Coke's Streaming, the poem, America I sing you back was born not out of anger but concern for what she saw happening in the United States 12 years ago, alarmed by the greediness of politicians to take natural resources from the land. America I sing you back can be interpreted as an alternate view to the identity of America, following in the footsteps of Walt Whitman's poem, I Hear America Singing and Langston Hughes, I too. In 2022, she published Look at This Blue, which was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry.

• Melissa Tuckey, ed. Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

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