Allen, Jeffery Renard 1962-

views updated

ALLEN, Jeffery Renard 1962-

PERSONAL:

Born 1962, in Chicago, IL. Education: University of Illinois at Chicago, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Queens College, City University of New York, 65-30 Kissena Blvd., Klapper 534, Flushing, NY 11367. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Author and educator. Queens College, City University of New York, associate professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Heartland Award, 2000, Chicago Tribune, for Rails under My Back; Twenty-first Century Award, Chicago Public Library; Whiting Writer's Award; Center for Scholars and Writers fellow, New York Public Library; John Farrar fellow, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference; Walter E. Dakins fellow, Sewanee Writers' Conference.

WRITINGS:

Harbors and Spirits (poems), Asphodel (Wakefield, RI), 1998.

Rails under My Back (novel), Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor of fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews to publications such as Ploughshares, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, African Voices, Notre Dame Review, Antioch Review, African American Review, and Other Voices.

Contributor to books, including 110 Stories: New York Writers after September 11, Step into the World: A Global Anthology of Black Literature, and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Jam Poetry Anthology.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jeffrey Renard Allen's first novel, Rails under My Back, was published to much acclaim, and the book has received awards such as Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award and the Chicago Public Library's Twenty-first Century Award. Allen's "impressive first novel is a tour de force that merges the millenarian Gothic style of William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman with the hallucinated urban grotesques of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathanel West, George Cain, and Chester Himes," stated reviewer James Smethurst in Chicago's Tribune Books. "The stories of two intermarried families, the Griffiths and the Simmonses, allow Allen to engage black secular and sacred history and destiny in a manner that is often nightmarish and bleak, but ultimately hopeful," Smethurst noted. Judy Lightfoot, writing in the Seattle Times, remarked that "Allen's themes are the ordinary mysteries of human beings everywhere: the fitful dynamics between generations, the various effects of minor events on different members of the same family, and the uniqueness of every human life."

Allen's "intricate and involving first novel evokes the works of Joyce and Faulkner, and as its title suggests, it's a book very much concerned with travel, both metaphorical and actual," noted Stephen Donadio in a review of Rails under My Back for the New York Times Book Review. The book is also steeped in notions of family ties and connections of kinship. "Boldly impressionistic and held together brilliantly by a series of symbols deeply rooted in African American and Western traditions, it tells the story of two black families in danger of disintegrating under the pressures of contemporary life," remarked Robert Butler in the African American Review.

In the novel two brothers, John and Lucifer Jones, representing the Griffith family line, marry two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan, from the Simmons lineage. Lucifer and Sheila have two children, Hatch and Porsha, while John and Gracie have one son, Jesus. While growing up in the families' inner-city home, Hatch and Jesus become inseparable and are more like brothers than cousins, but as they mature and their distinct personalities start to emerge, they drift radically apart. Studious and articulate Hatch is a voracious reader interested in the intellectual life who longs for a career in music; the rebellious Jesus, on the other hand, finds the violence and faux glamour of street life irresistible and drifts into a gang lifestyle. Hatch and his photographer-model sister Porsha seek a stronger connection with each other through their family history while Jesus's increasing violence threatens to sever his ties to family. As the novel progresses, the question rises whether Hatch will be able to escape the city life that binds him, and whether Jesus will be destroyed by urban violence.

"Allen's prose is intense, concentrated," remarked Donadio. "His language, which ranges from the delicately lyrical to the aggressively vulgar, demonstrates extraordinary poise; he can deploy, in his dialogue, a wide array of voices and nuances of tone." "As much as there is to admire in Allen's rhapsodic language and characterization skills," commented Greg Tate in the Voice Literary Supplement, "his symphonic mastery of novelistic form is equally awe-inspiring (not to mention his intimate familiarity with the whole damn human comedy—his broad panoply of minor characters all have epic stories to tell; he pries into the secrets and petty volatile marital rages like a domestic combat veteran)." Butler called Rails under My Back "a novel of considerable power and technical skill."

"The story Allen keeps us busy assembling is no less than that of the varieties of African-American experience over much of the past century," Donadio observed. Rails under My Back is "a beautiful and powerful novel, and will surely emerge among the more important works of fiction in the African American literary tradition," wrote Christopher C. De Santis in Review of Contemporary Fiction. "In an era when marketability reigns," Lightfoot remarked, "we should thank [Allen's] publishers … for backing a first novel this challenging, ambitious, and seriously literary." Allen "has given us a great gift," Tate concluded, "a bleak, staggering, and elliptical monument to the African American family in this millennial moment."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

African American Review, spring, 2002, Robert Butler, review of Rails under My Back, p. 170.

Chicago Tribune, August 30, 2000, Sam Weller, "Heartland Winner Earns Comparisons With Faulkner, Joyce, Even Poe," profile of Jeffery Renard Allen, p. 1.

Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 2000, Dale Edwyna Smith, review of Rails under My Back, p. 18.

Elle, January, 2000, Vince Passaro, "The Dream Fulfilled," p. 36.

Library Journal, December, 1999, p. 181.

New York Times Book Review, April 30, 2000, Stephen Donadio, review of Rails under My Back, p. 25.

Publishers Weekly, November 2, 1998, review of Harbors and Spirits, p. 76.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 2002, Christopher C. De Santis, review of Rails under My Back, p. 169.

Seattle Times, February 6, 2000, Judy Lightfoot, "'Rails' Follows the Tracks of Two Families."

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 30, 2000, James Smethurst, review of Rails under My Back, p. 1.

Voice Literary Supplement, February-March, 2000, Greg Tate, review of Rails under My Back, p. 104.