Below is just a partial history of Hedge Coke’s amazing experience…To explore more, check out the Poetry Foundation’s website

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Texas raised in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains. Of mixed heritage, she is a poet, writer, and educator. Though she left school to work in the fields as a child, she later took advantage of tuition-free community ed classes North Carolina State University while a field worker. She left North Carolina, escaping domestic violence as a young mother, and enrolled in former field worker retraining on the West coast when leaving manual labor due to disability. She then studied script, performance and sound/light/film tech at Estelle Harmon's Actor's Workshop, earned an AFAW in creative writing on the old Institute for American Indian Arts campus in Santa Fe, attended two Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Programs, and earned an MFA from Vermont College (1995), where she stayed for post-grad work.

Hedge Coke grew up listening to her father’s traditional stories. In Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, she explores her the experience of culture, growing up with a schizophrenic mother who was visually impaired, veteran father with hearing loss, disability, displacement, teenaged chemical dependency, as well as her struggles in youth through abject abuse in her early life, with disability, inequity, and life as a laborer in fields, factories, and on waters.

Hedge Coke has worked as a mentor and teacher on reservations, in urban areas, in juvenile facilities, mental institutions, and in prisons—and migrant worker and refugee at-risk youth communities. She founded and directed LAMIYSD, then a Y-Writers Voice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she created youth and labor outreach programs, and has worked as an artist in residence for numerous programs in the state and nationwide. She was named Mentor of the Year in 2001 by the Wordcraft Circle for her work in literary arts mentorship for incarcerated youth and won the Sioux Falls Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence in 2003.