Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works. Early life and education Coke was born in Amarillo, Texas, to a family she claims were of French-Canadian, Alsatian, English, Irish, Welsh, Portuguese, Cherokee, Huron, and Muscogee descent. She self-identifies as Native American despite not being enrolled in any Native tribe, and claims that her paternal grandfather Vaughn "refused tribal enrollment for himself and his children" to protest the "diabolical Dawe's Act". Hedge Coke had a very non-traditional childhood educational experience, dropping out of high school to work in the crop fields to provide for herself. She then completed her GED at age 16 where she shortly after began taking community education classes at North Carolina State University, studying photography, traditional arts, and writing. Hedge Coke studied performance, directing and tech at Estelle Harmon's Actors Workshop, and went on to earn an AFAW in creative writing from the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA summer exchange fellow at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program), and an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. Career She held a National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor/Writer appointment for Hartwick College (2004). She is an original and emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute Think-Tank, a MacDowell Colony for the Arts Fellow, a Hawthorden Castle Fellow, a Soul Mountain Fellow, a Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities Fellow, a Lannan Foundation residency fellow, and a current University of Nebraska–Lincoln Center for Great Plains Studies Fellow (flagship campus). She served as the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English, and as an Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Writing in the English Department of the University of Nebraska at Kearney (2007–2012) and University of Nebraska low-residency MFA program (2007–current). She was visiting Artist of the University of Central Oklahoma (2012–2014), and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (2014). She has also served as a Visiting Writer for the University of California Riverside (2014) and University of California Riverside–Palm