Jeffery Renard Allen - An Accomplished Author

Jeffery Renard Allen was born and raised in Chicago. He is an award-winning author of five books, including the novels SONG OF THE SHANK and RAILS UNDER MY BACK, which won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction; the short story collection HOLDING PATTERN, which received The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; and two collections of poetry. Allen holds a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. He's also a founder and director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a non-profit organization that serves writers

His other accolades include The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a residency at the Bellagio Center, and fellowships at The Center for Scholars and Writers, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Jeffrey Renard Allen's essays, fiction, reviews, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, StoryQuarterly, African Voices,  The Antioch Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Notre Dame Review, and, The Literary Review. In writing about his fiction, you'll notice in reviews his lyrical use of language and his playful use of form to write about African American life. His poems focus on music, mythology, history, film, and other sources rather than narrative or autobiographical experiences. Let's take honest reviews of some of his books so that you might enjoy his craft. 

"FAT TIME AND OTHER STORIES"

"FAT TIME AND OTHER STORIES" is a powerful collection from PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Allen. It encompasses 12 stories loosely linked around African notions of time and place, along with African views of space,  metaphysics, and cosmology. The setting of the collection is America and Africa, and it plays out over a continuum of time. A more profound linkage emerges in the form of a shadow narrative about;  destruction in the specific form of violence to the Black body on one side and creation and making, namely through the idioms of music and painting on the other.

Jeffrey's articulate weaves in elements of historical fact and the fantastic all through "FAT TIME AND OTHER STORIES" his writing for this collection is intense, astute, and subtly rendered with magical realism and folk wisdom. His themes of destruction and renewal, estrangement and war, despair and hardship, and love and desire are universal in this collection. Although his characters face defeat and folly, they endure and prevail. The 12 stories taken together represent his masterpiece craft.

"SONG OF THE SHARK"

"Song of the shark" is another of Jeffery's influential novels from the prodigiously talented author of RAILS UNDER MY BACK (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). It recaps the obscure history of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a remarkable nineteenth-century African American musical prodigy and "idiot savant" who performed under the stage name Blind Tom. Thomas Greene Wiggins, born into slavery in Georgia in 1849, was one of the first African American classical musicians, a contemporary of virtuosos such as  Rubinstein and Liszt. 

The novel begins near the end of summer in 1866 on a country estate as seventeen-year-old Tom and his twenty-five-year-old guardian Eliza Bethune make arrangements to leave the sanctuary of their cottage for a fashionable city apartment. As the narrative unfolds, the two face world challenges with conflicting demands on their relationship and Tom's talents. Tom is at the novel's heart; characters who encounter him are profoundly changed. They place their hopes in him, project their desires and beliefs on his skin, and stake their futures in his flesh. As the novel concludes, a note of possibilities emerges as Tom works to find his voice and music.

"HOLDING PATTERN"

From Jeffery Renard Allen's collection of short stories, HOLDING PATTERN is a renowned city ( Chicago) in which one young man is jailed for jumping a subway turnstile, sprout wings, or copper pennies might rain from the skies. Although there are no fairy tales, Jeffrey's African American life is assuredly contemporary. Dazzlingly written, consistently entertaining, and astonishingly inventive, HOLDING PATTERN is a break-out collection that's imaginative, brave, empathetic, and beautifully told. They are transcendent and astonishing stories—Jeffrey calibrates mounting tension with exquisite timing in mesmerizing prose, which won him super comparison with Joyce and Faulkner and The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

"RAILS UNDER MY BACK"

RAILS UNDER MY BACK is a dazzling novel, which was hailed nationwide as a rare achievement on the level of fiction by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright. It's a communal expression of a century of African-American life in America with its imagery of the journey and exile, departure, and destiny. Jeffery articulated great religion, historical power, and literacy, making this collection's triumphant debut of a powerful and utterly original voice.

Conclusion

Jeffrey Renard Allen is dedicated to supporting upcoming writers and literary culture on the African continent through the Pan African Literary Forum and the Jahazi Jazz and Literature Festival in Zanzibar. It made him create Taint. Taint is an innovative magazine that puts to work staging conferences and other events. The Taint Writer's Workshop and Retreat took place in Marrakesh in June 2022, the same year Graywolf Press published Allen's collection FAT TIME AND OTHER STORIES. He made his home in Johannesburg, where he worked on several projects, including the memoir Mother Wit and Stanley Falls: Seven Beauties, a reimagining of historian George Washington Williams around his advocacy to end slavery in the Congo.