JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN An American Famous Novelist www.authorjefferyrenardallen.com ABOUT: Jeffery Renard Allen (born 1962 Chicago) is an American poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999) and Stellar Places (Moyer Bell, 2007), and three works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), a story collection Holding Pattern (Graywolf Press, 2008) and a second novel, Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2014). www.authorjefferyrenardallen.com Literary festival in Nairobi, Kenya. With fellow author Arthur Flowers, he founded the Pan African Literary Forum, which held an international writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, in July 2008 that featured more than one hundred participants. Jeffery Renard Allen has worked with developing writers around the African continent. In 2006, he taught for the Kwani. AWARDS Jeffery Renard Allen was awarded The P.E.N. Discovery Prize in 1989. His widely celebrated novel, Rails Under My Back, won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His story collection Holding Pattern won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.[14] He has also been awarded a Whiting Award. SONG OF THE SHANK is the powerful new novel from the prodigiously talented author of RAILS UNDER MY BACK (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). It recounts the obscure history of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a remarkable nineteenth-century African American musical prodigy and “idiot savant” who performed under the stage name Blind Tom. Born a slave in Georgia in 1849, Wiggins was one of the first African American classical musicians, a contemporary of virtuosos such as Liszt and Rubinstein. SONG OF THE SHANK THANK YOU FOR GETTING TO KNOW ME. KNOW MORE :