Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the
American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.[1]
Early life and education
Coke was born in Amarillo, Texas, to a family she claims were of French-Canadian, Alsatian, English, Irish, Welsh, Portuguese,
Cherokee,
Huron, and
Muscogee descent. She self-identifies as Native American despite not being enrolled in any Native tribe, and claims that her paternal grandfather Vaughn "refused tribal enrollment for himself and his children" to protest the "diabolical
Dawe's Act".[2] However, enrollment on the Dawes Rolls was not optional. Hedge Coke had a very non-traditional childhood educational experience, dropping out of high school to work in the crop fields to provide for herself. She then completed her GED at age 16 where she shortly after began taking community education classes at North Carolina State University, studying photography, traditional arts, and writing. Hedge Coke studied performance, directing and tech at Estelle Harmon's Actors Workshop, and went on to earn an AFAW in creative writing from the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA summer exchange fellow at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program), and an MFA in poetry from Vermont College.[3]
Hedge Coke's work Blood Run, a free verse poetry collection of 66 poems, was inspired by the traditions of the Native American
Mound Builders and their earthworks. Blood Run revives the history of the sites giving profound voice to humans, animals, plants and structures, also with political-ecological hope for the future to preserve ancient spiritual places.[10] The poems show a mathematical patterning based on the numbers four, three and seven and on the sequence of the first 24.
primes.[11] In Hedge Coke's Streaming, the poem, America I sing you back was born not out of anger but concern for what she saw happening in the United States 12 years ago, alarmed by the greediness of politicians to take natural resources from the land. America I sing you back can be interpreted as an alternate view to the identity of America, following in the footsteps of Walt Whitman's poem, I Hear America Singing and Langston Hughes, I too.[10]
Discography
Streaming, Long Person Records (Yvwi Gvnahita), with trio project Rd Klā (album)[12]
Bibliography
Burn (Illustrated by Dustin Mater), MadHat Press, 2017 (Poems)
ISBN1941196454
It's Not Quiet Anymore: New Work from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Co-Senior Editor with Heather Ahtone,
Institute of American Indian Arts Press.[25]
Voices of Thunder: New Work from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Co-Senior Editor with Heather Ahtone,
Institute of American Indian Arts Press.
They Wanted Children, editor, Sioux Falls School District Press. Sioux Falls School District (South Dakota)
Sioux Falls School District (South Dakota) Poems and stories of coping. The Lost Boys from Sudan, American Indian students, Immigrant...
It's Not Quiet Anymore: New Work from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Co-Senior Editor with Heather Ahtone, Institute of American Indian Arts Press.
Institute of American Indian Arts Press.[25]
Voices of Thunder: New Work from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Co-Editor with Heather Ahtone, Institute of American Indian Arts Press.[25]