Jeffery Renard Allen
Jeffery Renard Allen’s most recent novel, Song of the Shank, won the CLMP Firecracker Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was also nominated for the Dublin Literary Prize. Allen is the author of two other works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction, and the short story collection Holding Pattern, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.