Allison Joseph

Allison Joseph was born in London, England, to Caribbean parents and grew up in Toronto, Canada and the Bronx, New York. She is a graduate of Kenyon College and the MFA Program at Indiana University. Joseph is the author of many collections of poetry, including Dwelling (2025), Lexicon (2021), Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (2018), all from Red Hen Press. Joseph’s other books include My Father’s Kites (Steel Toe Books, 2010), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press, 2009), Worldly Pleasures (Word Poetry, 2004), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997), and What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand Press, 1992), which won a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Of her work, which frequently joins autobiography to cultural narratives and histories of Afro-Caribbean communities, Joseph has said, “I write to be a recorder, observer, participant, and sometimes, even judge. I want to engage the world as I see it with my whole self—all those different aspects of it.”

Joseph’s honors and awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and from the Illinois Arts Council. She is the recipient of a George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Joseph is the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professor of English at Southern Illinois University where she has taught for over 30 years. At SIU she serves as the editor of Crab Orchard Review, directs the MFA program, and ran the Young Writers Workshop, a summer program for high school students, for nineteen years. She is now the director of Writers in Common, a writing conference for writers of all ages and experience levels. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.