Of Cherokee, Huron, Eastern Tsalagi, French Canadian, and European descent, poet and educator Allison Adelle Hedge Coke grew up in North Carolina, Texas, Canada, and the Great Plains region. She attended North Carolina State University and earned an AFAW in creative writing from the Institute for American Indian Arts and an MFA from Vermont College. 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), and Blood Run (2006); and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004).
 
Hedge Coke grew up listening to her father’s traditional stories. In Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer,she explores her Native American heritage and the experience of growing up with a schizophrenic mother, as well as her struggles with alcoholism and abuse. In Blood Run, a verse play, Hedge Coke’s persona poems advocate the need to protect the indigenous North American mound city Blood Run.
 
Hedge Coke has worked as a mentor and teacher with Native Americans—on reservations, in urban areas, and in prisons—and at-risk youth. She was named Mentor of the Year in 2001 by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.
 
Hedge Coke has also edited numerous anthologies, including two of student writing: Coming to Life, poems for peace in response to 9-11 (2002) and They Wanted Children (2003). She has also edited It’s Not Quiet Anymore (1992), Voices of Thunder (1993), To Topos (2007), and Effigies (2009), a collection of work by Inupiat and Hawaiian Native poets.
 
Dog Road Woman won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and Hedge Coke has twice received the Writer of the Year award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She held a National Endowment for the Humanities appointment at Hartwick College in 2004, and is a professor of poetry and writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. She has also taught at Naropa University and is currently visiting artist-writer at the University of Central Oklahoma.