(Autobiographical sketch of Hedge Coke, a mixed-blood woma...)
Autobiographical sketch of Hedge Coke, a mixed-blood woman, presented in her debut collection of poems. Autobiographical sketch of Hedge Coke, a mixed-blood woman, presented in her debut collection of poems.
(In poems as beautiful in their telling as they are powerf...)
In poems as beautiful in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos, poet and memoirist Hedge Coke draws upon her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker and fisherwoman, articulating the stark contrast between a tradition of labor that instills pride and builds strong communities with the modern-day reality of backbreaking work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.
(This book testifies to the need to protect the remarkable...)
This book testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run and the sacred remains she guards there in mounded tombs. The persona poems herein emanate its character embraced in architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.
Dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt are four exceptional emerging poets. Their Pacific Rim relationship invited the opportunity to publish these four chapbooks in one collected volume. Like effigy earthworks, stone, and bone carvings, the books included in this volume portray representational imagery as testimonies to the stunning spirit, landscapes, and lives from which these poets derive. A significant statement as to the changing state of the world, this collection is a rich pleasure.
A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry
(For the very first time, some of South Dakota's best poet...)
For the very first time, some of South Dakota's best poets have been gathered together into one book. A Harvest of Words offers an excellent snapshot of poetic life as it currently exists in the state and each of these literary artists has been given an entire chapter to showcase their award-winning work. These are poets at the top of their game. Their work illuminates what it means to come from this state, from this region, and this country.
(Editor and poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke assembles this ...)
Editor and poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation.
Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival (American Indian Lives)
("Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer" is Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’...)
"Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer" is Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s searching account of her life as a mixed-blood woman coming of age off-reservation, yet deeply immersed in her Huron, Métis, and Cherokee heritage.
Effigies II: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim
(These five first books join to represent a freshly emergi...)
These five first books join to represent a freshly emerging 21st Century Indigenous Mainland poetry. This collection releases a reader into parallel spaces of Native culture as diverse as the US-occupied landscapes they embody; the desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes Region, Kansas, and Oklahoma, bringing a bit of urban and rural symphony by resisting folds into Americana with courageous unfolding imagery in a serious range of departure.
American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement
("Poetics of Social Engagement" emphasizes the ways in whi...)
"Poetics of Social Engagement" emphasizes the ways in which innovative American poets have blended art and social awareness, focusing on aesthetic experiments and investigations of ethnic, racial, gender, and class subjectivities.
(The Effigies series has woven a vibrant tapestry of indig...)
The Effigies series has woven a vibrant tapestry of indigenous poets from Native North America and the Pacific. As the third in this series, this anthology continues this weaving with the work of four emerging Pacific islander women poets from Guam, Hawai'i, and Fiji.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet, editor, writer, and educator. She authored books include: "Streaming," "Blood Run," "Off-Season City Pipe," "Dog Road Woman," "The Year of the Rat," and "Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer." Hedge Coke has edited eight additional collections.
Background
Ethnicity:
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is of Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Portuguese, English, Irish, Scot, and mixed Southeastern Native heritage.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Amarillo, Texas, on August 4, 1958, and grew up in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains.
Education
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke dropped to school in the young age to work in fields. She finished her General Educational Development at sixteen years old and went on to study photography, traditional arts, and writing in community education classes at North Carolina State University. Hedge Coke moved to Tennessee and then California, where she participated in retraining for former field workers, studied performing arts and completed a play, Icicles. She received an Apprentice of Fine Arts in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and then took the Graduate Record Examinations, skipping her bachelor’s degree to earn a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Vermont College.
In her initial days of high school, Hedge Coke dropped out and went to work sharecropping tobacco, working fields, and waters to support herself. She had already been working in factories, fields, and food service on a North Carolina child work permit since early youth.
She has edited two collections of Native American writing and her work has been included in periodicals and anthologies.
From 1985 to 1990 she worked as Performing Arts Organizer in American Indian Community Advocate in Duluth, Minnesota, United States. Later she got a Writing Lab Monitor/Assistant position in Creative Writing Lab Institute of American Indian Arts in 1991-1993. Also, she worked as Teaching Writer in Residence/Area Coordinator at California Poets In The Schools (1994-1996), she took part in PostGraduate Mentorship Teaching Fellowship, Oxnard Community College (1995-1996) and in 1996-2004 was an advocate in CASA/Indian Youth Advocacy 7th District Court.
Allison Hedge Coke had long-term work experience (1997-2014) as a Literary Artist/Teaching Writer in Residence in South Dakota Arts Council. From 2000 to 2004 she was a Writer in Residence in Sioux Falls School District and the Office of Indian Education Sioux Falls. 2002-2004 was a period, when Allison Hedge Coke worked as Writers Voice Founding Director in non-profit organization Sioux Falls Family YMCA, and University of Sioux Falls. In 2003 she began to work at Kilian Community College, Naropa University and The Craft and Compilation Radio. Later she continued her career as National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hartwick College (2004), Assistant professor in Northern Michigan University (2005-2006), professor at Institute of American Indian Arts (2006-2007), Distinguished Reynolds Chair and Associate Professor in University of Nebraska (2007-2012). From 2007 she has been a Founding Director in Literary Sandhill Cranefest & Retreat. Allison Hedge Coke was invited to be a visiting writer at the University of California (2008), the University of Central Oklahoma (2012-2014). In 2014 she became the Distinguished Writer in Residence in the University of Hawaii at Manoa. 2015-2016 were the years, when she worked as Faculty in the Oklahoma City University, at the University of Arkansas at Monticello and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Now she works as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Coke's first full-length collection of poetry was "Dog Road Woman", which received the American Book Award for poetry in 1998. The work is a collection of autobiographical poems exploring mixed-blood ancestry and the psychological crises arising from her attempts to achieve completeness in the midst of disparate white and Native cultures. The book can be viewed, according to Darby Li Po Price in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, as a “journey of survival through disconnection from wholeness, ensuing crisis, a growing consciousness of larger connections, and active power to assert herself on her terms.”
Hedge Coke grew up listening to her father’s traditional stories. In "Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer" she explores her Indigenous heritage and the experience of growing up with a schizophrenic mother, displacement, as well as her struggles in youth with alcoholism and abuse and her early 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 Indigenously built site as noted in the Don D. Walker Award-winning article written by Chadwick Allen.
Hedge Coke has been an invitational poet-writer in Ireland, Scotland, China, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela. She has been instrumental in creating literary venues and programming with a special focus on Sandhill Cranes, the environment, migration, labor, incarcerated youth, and underserved communities, with career devotion to serving Indigenous communities.
Hedge Coke’s work has been supported with fellowships and residencies by several entities, including UNL Center for Great Plains, MacDowell Colony, Weymouth Center, Hawthornden Castle, Lannan Foundation, and, most recently, by the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress. She recently released an album with funk guitarist, Kelvyn Bell, and multi-instrumentalist, Laura Ortman.
Hedge Coke has worked in fields, factories, and waters and is currently at work with a feature-length labor and eco-ethos film, Red Dust: Resiliency in the Dirty Thirties. Motion Poems & Pixel Farms made an animated short film from her poem, “She Shakes Chilis from her Hair.” She has held distinguished and endowed positions and her teaching has garnished multiple excellence in teaching awards.
Quotations:
“I am interested in allowing creative work to serve as a vehicle for self-development (for my students as well as for myself), and as a catalyst in bridging multiple worldviews, encouraging and enhancing greater humanity and understanding while empowering indigenous communities, mixed racial peoples, abused, abandoned, and often forgotten common men, women, and children. I am also interested in the natural world and all of its creatures and life forms.”
"I think most poets are natural witnesses and we're curious about everything."
"Poetry is the lead mare of living and death. She is the balance of the beautiful and the horrendous. She is the historic memory and the nowness of light."
"We are always earmarking time and space as if cataloguing our placement in the universe. The land cradles us, gives us homing. History speaks to our comings and goings, our understandings or lack thereof. Class, economic burden, gender, preference, ethnicity, and belief infect the work with conceptual initiation to content. Our experiential lives give us a sense of identity we render into words or seek to detail throughout our movement through existence. We are what we are in the end. I hear it."
Membership
Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship
,
United States
2016
Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers
,
United States
Tulsa Artist Fellowship
,
United States
2017
A founding faculty member of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing and Publishing
,
United States
Personality
Allison is a musician, filmmaker, and writer who says she’s inspired by nearly everything. She studies change, motion, and migratory birds; she loves sandhill cranes, rain-soaked days, and hopes her work can serve as a catalyst for understanding the interrelatedness of the world.
Quotes from others about the person
Author Amira Baraka said: “Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people. This is a very formidable task, but it is, finally, the work we've chosen. She’s up to it.”
"Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s stunning work never disappoints. She writes the consuming fire–always on the original edge of remaking." - Jan Beatty, author of The Switching/Yard and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems
"Necessary illumination, visionary healing, groundbreaking and timely." - Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States
Interests
art, theater, music, literature, cultural philosophy, education, filmmaking
Connections
Allison Hedge Coke was married, she has a son Travis Hedge Coke.