Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair now lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and GrubStreet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Allison is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize-winning collection, The Clearing, forthcoming June 2020.
Winner of the 2019 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing is “a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively” (Henri Cole). From the midst of the Civil War to our current era, Adair charts fairy tales that are painfully familiar, never forgetting that violence is often accompanied by tenderness. Here we wonder, “What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have”?
