Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

“Path of a Hunted Bird” (page 158) is from African Fractals ; reproduced courtesy of Ron Eglash.

Blind Tom and Lerche (page 218) is from Ladies Home Journal , September 1898.

Harp (page 350), MO.0.0.30371, is from the collection of RMCA Tervuren; photo by J. Van de Vyver, RMCA Tervuren. Reproduced with permission.

Newspaper advertisement (page 341) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

Concert Program cover, special note, and overview (pages 342–344) are from the Library of Congress, Daniel A. P. Murray pamphlet collection, ML417.B3 M3.

Concert Program (pages 345–347) is from Music and Some Highly Musical People by James M. Trotter, Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1878.

Dominican Abbey, Ibadan (page 366) reproduced courtesy of Victor Ehikhamenor.

Harmonograph (page 482) created using www.subblue.com/projects/harmonograph.

Long Exposure of Ocean Waves at the Beach (page 504) by Joyce Vincent; reproduced courtesy 123RF.

Carved Door in Light (page 542) from Sally Price & Richard Price, Maroon Arts , Beacon Press, 1999 (Les arts des Marrons , Vents d’ailleurs, 2005).

The first epigraph is from an unattributed source, the second is an Ewe proverb, and the others are by Frédéric Chopin, Muddy Waters, Hildegard von Bingen, Malcolm X, Skip James, Abbey Lincoln, and Muhummad Ali, respectively.

JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999); a story collection, Holding Pattern (Graywolf, 2008); and the widely celebrated novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), which won the Chicago Tribune ’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the Charles Angoff Award for fiction from the Literary Review. He has been a fellow at the Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Tri Quarterly, Ploughshares, BOMB, Hambone, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 , and Homeground: A Guide to the American Landscape.

Allen was born in Chicago. He holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, an instructor in the graduate writing program at the New School, and an instructor in the low-residency MFA writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has also taught for Cave Canem; in the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya; for the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria; for the VONA/Voices Workshop; and in the writing program at Columbia University. He is the fiction director for the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers Colony, and is also the founder and director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a nonprofit organization that supports and aids writers on the African continent. Allen lives in the Bronx, New York.