Gilbert Allen

Gilbert Allen was born in Rockville Centre, New York, on January 1, 1951. He received his B.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow. Since 1977, he has lived in the foothills of South Carolina with his wife, Barbara. He is a professor of English at Furman University.

His first two collections of poems are In Everything (Lotus, 1982) and Second Chances (Orchises, 1991). His third collection, Commandments at Eleven (Orchises, 1994), was chosen as one of the year’s five most outstanding books by South Carolina’s principal newspaper, The State. His fourth book, Driving to Distraction (Orchises, 2003), was featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily.

Some of his individual poems have received the Amon Liner Award (1984), the William Wordsworth Award (1989), the Rainmaker Award (1990), the David Ray Award (1994), and the Robert Penn Warren Award (1994 and 1995). His short stories have received the Porter Fleming Award (1995, 2001, 2003), the South Carolina Fiction Project Prize (1987, 1989, 1992, 1998, 2004), and the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Prize (2001). In 1994, he and William Rogers edited the anthology 45/96: The Ninety-Six Sampler of South Carolina Poetry. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in such publications as The American Scholar, The Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, Epoch, First Things, The Georgia Review, Image, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, The Southeast Review, The Southern Review, and The Tampa Review.

Gilbert Allen has lectured about poetry and read his own work at colleges, literary festivals, and libraries throughout the Southeast. He has appeared frequently on South Carolina Public Radio, and he is listed prominently in Walter Edgar’s The South Carolina Encyclopedia. In May 1999, in recognition of his work as a writer, editor, and teacher, he was elected an honorary member of South Carolina’s Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He was the 2002-2003 recipient of the South Carolina Literary Arts Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission.

Gilbert Allen spent the 2004-2005 academic year on a sabbatical leave funded by the Mellon Foundation and Furman University. During this time, he co-edited A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry (Ninety-Six Press, 2005) and worked on some new poems of his own. On April 2, 2006, he hosted the symposium “The Great Grassy World from Both Sides”: Poets as Editors, Editors as Poets at Furman University. His newest collection of poems, Body Parts, received the South Carolina Poetry Initiative chapbook award in 2006 and was published in October 2007. His sequence of poems “The Assistant” received the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Prize from The Southern Review.