The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human. The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s resolve. In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.
Author
Jeffery Renard Allen is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and of the widely celebrated and influential 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 Writer’s Award, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review. He has been a fellow at The Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and Homeground: Language for an American Landscape. Born in Chicago, Renard Allen holds a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides teaching at Queens College (including, as of fall 2007, in the college’s new MFA program in creative writing), Allen is also an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has also taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. In addition, he is the director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, to be held in the summer of 2008. A resident of Far Rockaway, Queens, Allen is presently at work on the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.
