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On the rise: Dallas-born writer Kendra Allen’s work has never felt more timely

Now 25, Kendra Allen won the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction with her debut essay collection and recently signed a two-book deal with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Dallas-born writer Kendra Allen has marched in her share of Black Lives Matter protests. These experiences fueled her debut essay collection, When You Learn the Alphabet, which suddenly feels more timely and relevant than ever because of the way it deftly handles issues of identity and racism.

Last month, I called Allen, now 25, over FaceTime to ask about these topics. You’d expect her to be angry, given the brutality of police officers across America. But she’s quick to smile, and she laughs a lot, too.

Don’t mistake that for complacency, though. These days, Allen’s working on two new books as part of a publishing deal she signed with Ecco — an imprint of HarperCollins — in March. A poetry collection titled The Collection Plate is scheduled to publish in July, 2021, and a memoir will follow in 2022. Both works will explore many of the same themes from When You Learn the Alphabet, which won the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction in 2018.

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And next Thursday, July 9, Allen will speak about her life and work in a Facebook Live interview hosted by Book Mecca, an online Black bookstore based in Frisco.

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‘My mama’s my best friend’

Allen says she needed to grow up fast. That’s largely because her parents, who served in the same Army squad during the Gulf War, legally separated when she was seven.

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Raised by her mom, Allen moved frequently as a kid, living in Pleasant Grove, Mesquite and West Dallas, among other places. Because of the time they spent together, listening to Maxwell, Floetry and Sting, and attending the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Pleasant Grove — three and sometimes four days a week — it’s unsurprising that Allen and her mom, Carla, are close.

“My mama’s my best friend,” Allen says. “I know that’s corny, but it’s true. I call her like 20 times a day for no reason.”

In “Father Can You Hear Me” from her debut collection, Allen writes about her dad: “I don’t...
In “Father Can You Hear Me” from her debut collection, Allen writes about her dad: “I don’t get angry anymore. I’m aware of what he’s capable of giving, and I expect nothing more than what he’s gonna give.”(Steve Hamm / Special Contributor)

Allen and her father, though, have had a more conflicted relationship. There are good memories — including the game they would play on the drive from Dallas to Houston for her summer visits with him as a child. Looking out the windows of the car, they would call out things they saw. “‘A’ would be the antenna on the car, ‘B’ would be like a billboard and ‘C’ would be the car or another car outside,” Allen says. This story became the inspiration behind the title of When You Learn the Alphabet.

But mostly Allen and her dad have struggled to understand each other. In “Father Can You Hear Me” from her debut collection, Allen discusses her dad’s absence and her attempts to forgive him: “I don’t get angry anymore. I’m aware of what he’s capable of giving, and I expect nothing more than what he’s gonna give.”

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Although Allen told her dad what was in the book, he hasn’t spoken to her since he read it over a year ago. “Our relationship was growing, but I always felt in the back of my mind that anything could make it fall down,” Allen says.

The importance of Kiese Laymon

At first, Allen didn’t set out to be a writer. After graduating from Skyline High School in 2013, she enrolled at Columbia College Chicago, where she took journalism and photography courses. But a meeting with her advisor in her freshman year led her to an introduction to creative writing class.

There she encountered How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America, by Kiese Laymon, who was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. “It was the first time I read somebody as country as me, who talked like me and who was writing about neck bones and all this stuff that I had never seen in a book,” says Allen, who decided to submit When You Learn the Alphabet for the Iowa Prize in 2018 after finding out that Laymon was the judge.

Laymon has not only given Allen the permission to write like him, but he’s also influenced her treatment of racial inequities. “When he talks about race, he does not center whiteness,” she says. “He talks about it in a way that’s like a caress for Black people.”

‘It’s grief, constant grief’

While studying at Columbia, Allen participated in several Black Lives Matter protests. More than a few essays in her first collection sound like they could have been written yesterday.

“— we will never forget you are named too many names / we know by heart / Trayvon, Tamir, Sandra, Eric, / LaQuan, Philando, Michael, Dante, Tanisha, Walter, Jordan, Freddie, too / many names to name,” Allen writes in “Citizens Take Out the Trash.”

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“Did they say they tried to warn you but you were already full of lead?”

She hasn’t marched in the recent protests because of her mental health. “I spend a lot of time under my weighted blanket, just very sad,” she says. “It’s grief, constant grief.” But she has donated to bailout funds and signed petitions.

“Until you burn down these systems, until you abolish the police [and] prisons, we’re going to keep dying, there’s nothing we can do to not die,” she says.

“I have to talk about it because it’s really the only way I can survive.”

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Looking ahead

Late last month, Allen returned to the Dallas area, after completing a M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Alabama. It’s the first time she’s lived in the region since high school, and she’s writing a memoir that focuses on her early experiences growing up in Oak Cliff.

In fact, she says Oak Cliff is a central character in the book, right down to street names and landmarks. “I think it’s very important — because I love Dallas so much — to show it in relation to where I exist in the space, as well as the generations of women in my family and how they existed in that exact same space.”