Allison Joseph
Allison Joseph (born 1967) is an American poet, editor and professor. She is author of six poetry collections, most recently, My Father's Kites: Poems (Steel Toe Books, 2010).
Born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of SIUC's creative writing faculty and graduate students are involved with the workshop, and the student participants come from several states. In 1995, she was one of the founding editors of Crab Orchard Review as the magazine's poetry editor and has also worked as editor-in-chief since August 2001. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.
(from Wikipedia)
“Something about the turbulence of adolescence makes you want to do something creative...I thought as I got older I would stop writing about it, but I find adolescence, and popular depictions of it, very interesting. I like to see where my own life intersects or diverges from notions of what a teenager is supposed to be, or what a black person is supposed to be, or a woman.”