Allen Braden

Allen Braden has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witness Emerging Writers Prize, and the Grolier Prize, among other awards. Braden was the fourth and last generation to work on his family farm in White Swan, Washington, where they raised cattle, hay, grain, and hundreds of barn cats. He earned a BA from Central Washington University and has MA and MFA degrees from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Braden has published his poetry in such journals and anthologies as The Virginia Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets 2005, and The New Republic. He has been published online by Poetry Daily, Literary Salt, Arhutus, Brevity, and Switched-on Gutenberg. His essay “Richard Hugo’s Marginal West,” appears in a recent issue of North Dakota Quarterly. Founder of The Gallery Reading Series, he teaches poetry and interdisciplinary writing at Tacoma Community College.

Allen also received a 1998 GAP.

As part of his Fellowship’s Meet the Artist requirements, Allen met with over 40 Lower Columbia College students, faculty and members of the community to discuss how American poetry defines masculinity in the modern male. That evening, he gave a poetry reading, held at the Longview Public Library as part of the Northwest Voices series, to a crowd of almost 50 people and answered questions afterward.