1/31/2012
The Reading Life 89.9 WWNO
Hear Alison discuss her new book "Hurricane Party" on WWNO's The Reading Life, with former Times-Picayune book editor Susan Larson.  

12/05/2011
Winner of the Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize
"Pantoum of the Endless Hurricane Debris," won the 11th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. It will be published in Smartish Pace, Issue 19. Here is the official announcement.

10/10/2011
I am thrilled that the University of Akron Press has just released my third poetry collection Hurricane Party. Typically when I have a book come out, I am in a state of panic about what my next project will be--I start to question if I'll ever be able to write another poem, much less another book. This time, though, everything is different. I am about halfway through a new manuscript which I have tentatively titled Dirty South, which moves away from the hurricane ravaged landscape that has dominated my poems (and my psyche!) for the last six years. My landscape and my poems continue to be haunted by floodwaters, but in Dirty South I feel like I am making new ground. I have also been able to explore some troubling environmental issues in these poems, the sense of doom I sometimes feel living in the South, and raising children in this environment which is so dear and sometimes so troubling to me.

Artist of the Month: December 2011

From Image Journal:

"Alison Pelegrin is a citizen of Louisiana through and through, and her poems read like love songs to the place. In her verse, which effortlessly marries formal elements with natural speaking rhythm, she explores the silty, dangerous landscape of her home state, and the resilient nature of community life on vulnerable, ever-shifting ground. Her work is also threaded with a personal history so deeply grounded in that river-born soil that the silt seems to run in her veins. Like many Louisianans, she is at once haunted and spurred by the great hurricane. For her, the storm is a point of reckoning with God, with nature, with justice, and with her city—an occasion for theodicy, the outpouring of grief, and a dogged rebirthing. Pelegrin is an ecologist in the broadest terms: she is a student of the natural world; but also of the human ecology of homes, traditions, and communities; of the ecosystems of memory, with its own multifarious and persistent life; and of the complex web that springs up among place, people, and history."

View Alison's previous work in IMAGE issue 70 here.