Song of the Shank

The first epigraph is from an unattributed source, the second is an Ewe proverb, and the others are by Frédéric Chopin, Muddy Waters, Hildegard von Bingen, Malcolm X, Skip James, Abbey Lincoln, and Muhummad Ali, respectively.

About the Author

JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999); a story collection, Holding Pattern (Graywolf, 2008); and the widely celebrated novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the Charles Angoff Award for fiction from the Literary Review. He has been a fellow at the Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Tri Quarterly, Ploughshares, BOMB, Hambone, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, and Homeground: A Guide to the American Landscape.

Allen was born in Chicago. He holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, an instructor in the graduate writing program at the New School, and an instructor in the low-residency MFA writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has also taught for Cave Canem; in the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya; for the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria; for the VONA/Voices Workshop; and in the writing program at Columbia University. He is the fiction director for the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers Colony, and is also the founder and director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a nonprofit organization that supports and aids writers on the African continent. Allen lives in the Bronx, New York.