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For the writer, the place of origin becomes fertile ground for the imagination. This is surely the case with Allison Adelle Hedge Coke who agreed to let me interview her for this issue of NCLR featuring expatriate writers for whom North Carolina is bedrock. In her early life, Hedge Coke worked the fields, factories, and waters of North Carolina. Her writing frequents this landscape, as well as the culture that continues to inform the other places she claims as home. I was excited to interview Hedge Coke for this issue of NCLR because her poetry emanates from a consciousness that knows hard labor, hands in the earth, and season by season. Her poetry, for me, has been a revelation of lush detail of the natural world. Hers is a voice of appreciation for all that she has known as a Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Portuguese, English, Irish, Scot, and mixed Southeastern Native, poet, writer, and educator.
A Fulbright Scholar, Hedge Coke is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and 2020 Dan & Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair of Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She is the author of six poetry collections - The Year of the Rat (Grimes, 1996), Dog Road Woman (Coffee House Press, 1997), Blood Run (Salt, 2006), Off-Season City Pipe (Coffee House Press, 2005), Streaming (Coffee House Press, 2014), and Burn (2017) - as well as a memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Her recent awards include the US Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas, the PEN Southwest Poetry Award, an IPPY Medal, and the First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award/Excellent Foreign Poet. She was selected for an inaugural Tulsa Artist Fellowship for writers in 2017. Other honors include the American Book Award, the KingChávez-Parks Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Distinguished Professorship, and many more accolades than I will list here. She is currently at work on a film, "Red Dust: Resiliency in the Dirty Thirties," a new CD, and, always, new poems.
This interview was conducted via email in February 2020.
You have origins in many different places, but in one...