Allison Adelle Hedge Coke & Mark Pawlak

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s five books include: Dog Road Woman (American Book Award), Wordcraft Writer of the Year for two Poetry volumes Off-Season City Pipe (labor poetry) and Blood Run (verse-play created in testimony for site protection which led to a state park), poetry chapbook The Year of the Rat; and Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer, an AIROS Book-of-the-Month memoir, soon to be released in paperback. Fiction publications include: American Fiction, Black Renaissance Noire, Florida Review, and Bombay Gin. Her play, Icicles, was a National Repertory Theater National Play Award First Finalist. Hedge Coke is an award winning editor who serves on the editorial board of Black Renaissance Noire (NYU), with eight additional collections including Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Coming to Life (poems for peace in the wake of 9-11), Effigies: New Native Poetry from the Pacific Rim, and soon to be released Effigies II. She is Oendat, French Canadian, Portuguese, Tsalagi, Irish, Scot, English, Metis and Creek descent and came of age cropping tobacco and working fields, waters, and working in factories. Mark Pawlak is the author of seven poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest books are Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012) and Jefferson’s New Image Salon: Mashups and Matchups (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). For more than 30 years Pawlak has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose, one of the oldest independent literary journals and presses in the country. He supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston, where he is Director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge.