Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Texas raised in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains. Of mixed heritage, she is a poet, writer, and educator. A child laborer, she stayed in manual labor until nearly 30 years of age, working in fields, factories, waters (commercial fishing), construction, cleaning, serving, and training horses and dogs. Though she left school to work in the fields as a child, she later took advantage of tuition-free community ed classes at North Carolina State University while a field worker. She left North Carolina, escaping domestic violence as a young mother, and enrolled in former field worker retraining on the West coast when leaving manual labor due to disability. She then studied script, performance and sound/light/film tech at Estelle Harmon's Actor's Workshop, earned an AFAW in creative writing on the old Institute for American Indian Arts campus in Santa Fe, attended two Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Programs (on invited fellowships), and earned an MFA from Vermont College (1995), where she stayed for post-grad work.

She is the author of the poetry chapbook Year of the Rat (1996); the full-length poetry collections Dog Road Woman (1997), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), Blood Run (2006 UK, 2007 US), Streaming (2014), an illustrated (by Dustin Illetewahke Mater) special edition Burn (2017); and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004, 2014). Streaming comes with a full album recorded in the Rd Klā project period with Kelvyn Bell and Laura Ortman. One inclusion was selected by Motion Poems and Pixel Farms to be made into an animated film and several of the poems in Streaming also influenced the documentary project she directed, Red Dust. Her latest book, Look at This Blue, a poem, (2022), is an assemblage, book-length poem, and was already selected as a 2022 National Book Award Finalist and 2023 Emory Elliott Book Award winner.
 
Hedge Coke grew up listening to her father’s traditional stories. In Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, she explores her the experience of culture, growing up with an acutely schizophrenic mother who was visually impaired, veteran father with hearing loss, her own disability (C.P., epilepsy, COL3A1 gene variant, connective tissue disease, lazy eye, hearing impairment...), displacement, teenaged chemical dependency, as well as her struggles in youth through abject abuse in her early life, with disability, inequity, and life as a laborer in fields, factories, and on waters.

In Blood Run, a verse play, Hedge Coke’s persona poems advocate the need to protect the Indigenous North American mound city Blood Run (she successfully lobbied for and the state park renamed Good Earth opened in 2013). The book, and its prosody, are mathematically encoded to match the Indigenous built site as noted in the Don D. Walker Award winning article written by Chadwick Allen.
 
Hedge Coke has worked as a mentor, narrative medicine practitioner, and teacher on reservations, in urban areas, in juvenile facilities, mental institutions, and in prisons—and migrant worker and refugee at-risk youth communities. She founded and directed LAMIYSD, then a Y-Writers Voice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she created youth and labor outreach programs, and has worked as an artist in residence for numerous programs in the state and nationwide. She was named Mentor of the Year in 2001 by the Wordcraft Circle for her work in literary arts mentorship for incarcerated youth and won the Sioux Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence in 2003.
 
Hedge Coke edited numerous anthologies, including two of K-12 student writing: Coming to Life, poems for peace in response to 9-11 (2002) and They Wanted Children (2003). Other edited editions include: It’s Not Quiet Anymore (1992); Voices of Thunder (1993); From the Fields (1996); To Topos-Ahani (2007); Effigies, a collection of debut books from the Pacific Rim (2009); Sing: Poetry From the Indigenous Americas (2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by National Books Critics Circle's Critical Mass; Effigies II, collection of debut books from the continental US (2014) and Effigies III, collection of debut books by Queer Pacific Voices (2019).
 
In 1993, she was awarded the New Mexico Press Women's Award for best essay and Cid Corman selected her poetry for the Charlie and Thelma Willis Memorial Editor's Choice Award (Abiko Quarterly, Kyoto, Japan). Dog Road Woman won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She is a King-Chavez-Parks awardee, an IPPY Medalist (Streaming), a Pen Southwest Book Award winner (Streaming), and has won several state grant and community awards, twice received the Writer of the Year award for Poetry (Off-Season City Pipe & Blood Run), and twice received the Editor of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle (Effigies I & II), which most recently awarded her their highest honor, Wordcrafter of the Year, 2015. In 2015, she was also awarded the NWCA’s highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award. Following the publication of Streaming, US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera selected her for a Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellowship in 2016. In 2018, she was selected as the inaugural First Jade Nurtured Sihui Female International Poetry Award for Excellent Foreign Poet (with multiple honors (medallion, trophy) and official credential from the China Poetry Center of Beijing and Poetry Center of Sihui).

Hedge Coke held an NEH appointment at Hartwick College in 2004, and was a Reynolds Chair of Poetry and writing at the University of Nebraska where she co-directed the cohort MFA program and directed the Reynolds Series. She has taught for Naropa University, the University of California, Riverside, Northern Michigan University, Red Earth MFA, was Visiting Artist at the University of Central Oklahoma, served as a 2019 Fulbright Scholar in Montenegro and as Distinguished Writer in Residence (2014) and the Dan & Maggie Inouye Chair in Democratic Ideals (2020) at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. She founded and has directed the Literary Sandhill Cranefest Retreat since 2007, was a founding faculty member of the VCFA MFA in Writing and Publishing, and is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she most recently serves as principal investigator for a multiyear VA National Cemetery Administration Legacy Program in outreach with K-12 schools (and wrote/directed/produced 28 film shorts and four youth anthologies in Southern California and on Oahu), and directs UCR Writers Week Festival. In 2022-2023, additionally, she is the Mellon Dean's Professor for UC Riverside.



Hedge Coke was elected into the Texas Institute of Letters, awarded the AWP George Garrett Award for field service in 2021, and honored with a Legacy Artist Individual Artist Fellowship by the California Arts Council for 2021-2022.