Poetry. Native American Studies. In poems as beautiful in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos, poet and memoirist Hedge Coke draws upon her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker and fisherwoman, articulating the stark contrast between a tradition of labor that instills pride and builds storng communities with the modern-day reality of backbreaking work that fils to provide sustenance for the land or its people. Hedge Coke, of Huron, Tsa la gi, French Candadian and European descent, is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut collectoin Dog Road Woman and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow Deer.

Author City: KEARNEY, NE USA

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is a MacDowell, Black Earth Institute Think-Tank, Hawthornden Castle, Weymouth Center, and Center for Great Plains Research Fellow, and holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English as an Associate Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. She is a core faculty in the University of Nebraska MFA Program and Visiting Faulty of the MFA Intensive Programs at University of California, Palm Desert and Naropa University. Her books include: Dog Road Woman, American Book Award, Coffee House Press, 1997; The Year of the Rat, chapbook, Grimes Press, 2000; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, AIROS Book-of-the-Month, University of Nebraska Press, 2004; Off-Season City Pipe, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Coffee House Press, 2005; Blood Run, Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry, Salt Publications, UK 2006-US 2007; and To Topos Ahani, Oregon State University, 2007.