Allison Joseph was born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage and raised in Toronto and the Bronx. She is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks, most recently Confessions of a Barefaced Woman, published by Red Hen Press in 2018. She holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MFA from Indiana University. The winner of many fellowships and awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize and the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize, Joseph is editor-in-chief of the long-running magazine Crab Orchard Review, which she co-founded in 1995.
She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she is director of both the MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, the latter of which she founded in 1999. Her late husband, the poet Jon Tribble, passed away in 2019. Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois.
Photo credit: Photo by Mayapple Press is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0