Alison Powell
is a poet, lyric essayist, and scholar, and is Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. Her work has been featured on PBS NewsHour, Environmental Health News, and www.poets.org, and supported by institutions including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, Rockvale Writer’s Colony, Crosshatch Center for Arts and Ecology, and more.
She is the author of two collections of poetry: On the Desire to Levitate (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Ohio University Press 2014) and Boats in the Attic, (Editor’s Prize, Poets Out Loud / Poetic Justice Institute contest, Fordham University Press 2022). A chapbook of lyric essays titled The Art of Perpetuation was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2020. Her poems and lyric essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
Powell received her PhD in English Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, and her scholarship focuses on the relationship between play, morality, and aesthetics in the Romantic poets. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, son, daughter, dog, and two elusive cats.