Wolf, Allan 1963-

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Wolf, Allan 1963-

Personal

Born February 26, 1963, in Storrs, CT; married; children: three. Education: Virginia Tech, B.A., M.A. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, writing, drawing, basketball, music, books.

Addresses

Home and office—Asheville, NC. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Author, poet, performer, and educator. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, instructor in writing and composition, beginning c. 2005; Poetry Alive!, Asheville, NC, educational director and coordinator of national residency program, 1990-2003. Artist-in-residence at school in Seoul, South Korea. Member of The Dead Poets (poetry band).

Awards, Honors

Richard L. Hoffman Teaching Award, Virginia Tech; Best Book for Young Adults selection, American Library Association, Children's Book Award Notable Book selection, International Reading Association, and Southeastern Booksellers' Association Poetry Award finalist, all 2004, all for New Found Land: Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery.

Writings

POETRY

Something Is Going to Happen: Poem Performance for the Classroom, Poetry Alive! (Asheville, NC), 1990.

It's Show Time: Poetry from the Page to the Stage, Poetry Alive! (Asheville, NC), 1993.

The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts, illustrated by Greg Clarke, Candlewick Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

Immersed in Verse: An Informative, Slightly Irreverent and Totally Tremendous Guide to Living the Poet's Life, illustrated by Tuesday Mourning, Lark Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Haiku Stickies: 100 Haiku to Write and Leave Behind, Lark Books (New York, NY), 2007.

(With Sara Holbrook) More than Friends: Poems from Him and Her, Wordsong (Honesdale, PA), 2008.

NOVELS

New Found Land: Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery, Candlewick Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

Zane's Trace, Candlewick Press (Cambridge, MA), 2007.

Sidelights

Allan Wolf is a full-time poet and performer who conducts more than one hundred presentations each year. A former college instructor, Wolf joined Poetry Alive!, a traveling troupe of theatrical poets, in 1990 and served as the group's educational director for more than a decade. He is also the author of such works as The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts and Zane's Trace, the latter a young-adult novel.

Born in 1963 in Connecticut, Wolf was raised in Blacksburg, Virginia. At the age of twelve, he began experiencing episodes of hypergraphia, an overwhelming compulsion to write. Wolf wrote on his bedroom walls, first in pencil, then in permanent marker. "My walls became a diary upon which I recorded the events of my life," he noted on his home page. "I wrote on my walls every day for years until my room had become one huge continual tattoo of words and pictures that spread over all four walls, the ceiling, the floor, even some of the furniture." After graduating from high school, Wolf earned a master's degree from Virginia Tech and taught writing and composition there before taking a position with Poetry Alive!

In 2003 Wolf published The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts, his first work for young readers. A collection of humorous verse about the human anatomy, the book contains such poems as "Shy Silent Rivers," which explores the function of the circulatory system, and "Moving Food Along," a tribute to the intestines. According to a contributor in Publishers Weekly, "Wolf's debut … is sure to tickle the funny bone (one body part that isn't covered here)."

Wolf offers a how-to for young authors in Immersed in Verse: An Informative, Slightly Irreverent and Totally Tremendous Guide to Living the Poet's Life. Wolf advises budding poets on such topics as poetry forms, choosing an appropriate subject, and revising work, and he includes selections from Langston Hughes and Shel Silverstein, among others. "The information is intensive without being overwhelming, wise without being didactic," observed Teresa Pfeifer in School Library Journal. In the words of Booklist critic Hazel Rochman, Immersed in Verse "makes writing and reading poetry cool."

Wolf's novel-in-verse, New Found Land: Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery, presents an account of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's journey to the Pacific Ocean through the voices of fourteen narrators. Wolf told Publishers Weekly interviewer Sally Lodge that "the idea of multiple voices was a kind of theatrical thing for me. By creating the character's monologues I was able to have each of them speak their own minds and give their own descriptions of events and of other characters, leaving the reader to do the linking up." In the work, Wolf "manages something fresh and alive," observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor, and Patricia Moore, writing in Kliatt, stated that New Found Land "is a book of poetry; it is a book of history; it is a tour de force."

A distraught, epileptic teen is the focus of Zane's Trace, a novel for young adults. After his mother commits suicide, seventeen-year-old Zane Guesswind steals his brother's car and heads to her grave site in Ohio, where he plans to end his own life. His journey is interrupted by the spirits of his ancestors, who counsel the troubled

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teen, as well as by Libba, a mysterious hitchhiker. "Wolf successfully straddles the line between magical realism and unreliable narration, keeping each possibility alive to enrich the other," noted Horn Book reviewer Claire E. Gross. "Eventually we realize that [in Zane's Trace] Wolf is weaving an unexpectedly complex tale, one that speaks to the vagaries of American history and the ‘twisted, crazy-beautiful’ family trees so many of us have," observed Katie Haegele in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2003, Karin Snelson, review of The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts, p. 410; May 15, 2006, Hazel Rochman, review of Immersed in Verse: An Informative, Slightly Irreverent, and Totally Tremendous Guide to Living the Poet's Life, p. 44; October 15, 2007, Lynn Rutan, review of Zane's Trace, p. 48.

Horn Book, September-October, 2007, Claire E. Gross, review of Zane's Trace, p. 592.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2003, review of The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts, p. 917; July 15, 2004, review of New Found Land: Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery, p. 695; September 1, 2007, review of Zane's Trace.

Kliatt, January, 2008, Patricia Moore, review of New Found Land, p. 18.

Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 2007, Katie Haegele, "Zane's Trace: Teen Boy Has a Compulsion to Write, and a Death Wish."

Publishers Weekly, August 4, 2003, review of The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts, p. 80; October 25, 2004, Sally Lodge, "Allan Wolf: The Lewis and Clark Expedition in 14 Voices," p. 20; November 1, 2004, review of New Found Land, p. 63.

School Library Journal, October, 2003, Dona Ratterree, review of The Blood-hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts, p. 206; September, 2004, Renee Steinberg, review of New Found Land, p. 220; June, 2006, Teresa Pfeifer, review of Immersed in Verse, p. 190.