bio

[ps2id id=’bio-id’ target=”/] Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. Her first book of poetry, Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the CLMP Firecracker Awards, the Indigenous Voices Awards, and the Maya Angelou Book Award, and was long listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Allen is the recipient of a 92NY Discovery / Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize, a James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets from Poetry Northwest, the 49th Parallel Award in poetry from Bellingham Review, broadside prizes from Littoral Press and Sundress Publications, grants from Ontario Arts Council, sponsored residencies from Hedgebrook and CollarWorks’ Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). Her poems can be found in Poetry magazine, The Iowa Review, Narrative magazine, Brick, Boston Review, Best New Poets and other venues. She is a a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

Dr. Allen is an Assistant Professor of English at York University, where she specializes in Creative Writing and Indigenous Literatures. Her research centers on documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, and the enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative works. She received her PhD in English & Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, her MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan, and her BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Allen has previously contributed to technology startups as a web, product, and ui/ux designer. She is a member of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), the Center for Indigenous Knowledges and Languages at York University, and she serves as an archivist and volunteer fire lookout for the Sand Mountain Society. Allen’s most recent projects include a multimodal book of poetry and creative ethnography that incorporates intergenerational histories and diasporic movements, Haudenosaunee traditions, and archival materials of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School; and a memoir-in-verse about inheritance, matriarchy, grief, and joy.

>> teaching & work experience here

>> full list of publications & awards here