Jeffery Allen
From 13 April to 11 May 2026

The writer Jeffery Renard Allen was born in 1962 in Chicago. He is the award-winning author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the novels Song of the Shank (2014, shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award); and Rails Under My Back (2015, the winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction); as well as the short-story collections Holding Pattern (2008) and Fat Time and Other Stories (2023). His work often deals with African-American history and the questions of identity that such a troubled history raises for Blacks in the United States.