Spring Reading Series
The LU Department of Humanities and Communications welcomes esteemed poet and author Allison Joseph to campus to meet with students and share her work with the Mid-Missouri community.
Attendees will have the opportunity to purchase books and have them signed immediately following the reading.
Refreshments provided.
During her visit to Lincoln on April 11th, Ms. Joseph will present a Writing Talk at 11 a.m. at MLK Hall, Room 215.
Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University.
Born in London, England to parents of Caribbean heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx, New York. A graduate of Kenyon College and Indiana University, she serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review, the publisher of No Chair Press, and the director of Writers In Common, a writing conference for writers of all ages and experience levels. In 2014, she was awarded a Doctor of Letters honorary degree from her undergraduate alma mater, Kenyon College.
Her books and chapbooks include What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand Press), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon University Press), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press), Worldly Pleasures (Word Tech Communications), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon UP), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press), My Father's Kites (Steel Toe Books), Trace Particles (Backbone Press), Little Epiphanies (NightBallet Press), Mercurial (Mayapple Press), Mortal Rewards (White Violet Press), Multitudes (Word Poetry), The Purpose of Hands (Glass Lyre Press), Double Identity (Singing Bone Press) Corporal Muse (Sibling Rivalry Press) and What Once You Loved (Barefoot Muse Press). She has also published fiction and nonfiction, and travels frequently to read from her work at various festivals, conferences, and universities.
Her most recent poetry collections include Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021), Professional Happiness (Backbone Press, 2021), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018). Confessions of a Barefaced Woman was the Gold/First Place winner in the poetry category of the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Awards. It was also a 2019 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and a finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Da Vinci Eye Book Award, sponsored by the Eric Hoffer Book Awards.