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About Alison Pelegrin

Alison Pelegrin is the author of Our Lady of Bewilderment (LSU 2022), Waterlines (LSU 2016) Hurricane Party (Akron 2011) and Big Muddy River of Stars (2007), which won the Akron Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Individual Artist Grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and an ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. 

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere, and several are available as free printable broadsides at Broadsided Press. 

With the exception of the three years she left to earn an MFA degree in poetry at the University of Arkansas, Alison is a lifelong resident of Louisiana (Covington by way of Gretna). She and her husband Bryan Davidson have two grown children and too many animals, including a klutzy goofball rescue dog named Otis. Alison is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University where she has taught English for more than twenty years. 

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Books

Our Lady of Bewilderment 

LSU Press 2022

Whether by way of visitations from secular saints, hauntings from childhood, or back talk from “indelicate broads,” a complicated world speaks to and through Alison Pelegrin in Our Lady of Bewilderment. An unusual blend of mystic-comedian, Pelegrin explores physical and psychic beauty and terror without losing sight of wonder. Drawing on the aid of beings real and imaginary, Our Lady of Bewilderment offers humorous, honest, and intimate poems contemplating life’s traumas and joys, filtered through the religion-infused secular traditions of Louisiana.

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Waterlines

LSU Press 2016

In Waterlines, Louisiana native Alison Pelegrin gives us poems that describe the terrible power of nature even as they underscore the state’s beauty. The poet moves from the familiar gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain. In this fractured world, the Bogue Falaya River becomes a highway paved with benedictions, psalms, and praise for ordinary things, as Pelegrin searches the unfamiliar for an incarnation of home.
Water—the threat of hurricanes and floods, as well as the tangled geographies and histories of the rivers and lakes themselves—sustains the poet as she settles into the casual beauty of “the daily route,” finding spiritual depth and delight in both human and natural wonders.

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Hurricane Party

The University of Akron Press 2011

“Hurricane Party is an original and rewarding work, a masterful follow-up to Big Muddy River of Stars, and a livewire, compelling contribution to American poetry. No other poet sounds like Pelegrin, and that’s the sure sign of a writer at the top of her game.”—Elton Glaser

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Our Lady of the Flood

Diode Editions 2018

“Our Lady of The Flood sets before its altars all the rapturous junk and glorious miscellany of a world both rooted in tradition and constantly in flux. . . . Readers prepare to be transformed.”
Mary Biddinger

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Big Muddy River of Stars

Chosen by B. H. Fairchild as winner of the Akron Poetry Prize

University of Akron Press 2007

“With Li Po as her muse, and a subject matter ranging from home-wreckers, honky-tonks, and jackalopes to post-Katrina tragedy and survival, I’m afraid I’m stumped to find a fitting figure for the utterly unique voice of Alison Pelegrin. Words fail me, but certainly not Pelegrin, who writes some of the jazziest, high-velocity, and, if I may say so without causing the keepers of the gates of high culture to wet their pants, entertaining poetry I have read in a long time.”

B. H. Fairchild

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