Allison Adelle Hedge Coke teaches for UC Riverside, and is the author of eight books of poetry, one book of creative nonfiction, one play, she has made over thirty doc shorts, and has edited ten anthologies. She has worked with students and clients ages three to ninety-three in narrative medicine, including cancer centers, preschool children with down syndrome and autism, K-12 special education, literacy, life skills,  arts cultural and gifted programming, in criminally insane carceral wards, juvenile justice facilities, as community literacy mentor/advocate, as youth advocate in incarceration and judicial-proceedings, conflict negotiation, on an urban housing board (as community representative), a state curriculum board (as K-12 teacher advocate for inclusive and widely diverse learning), as honorary chair for houseless and un-homed people, on boards and programming representing disability justice and equity, as a circle member of an environmental justice, restoration, and land back effort, as proceedings advocate of protection, preservation, and return of access to occupied cultural spaces, as director of an intensive long-term residency program dedicated to the riparian environment and behavior of the sandhill crane and its species' emulation and attribute in multiple cultures, an NSF think-tank forum in forestry, fire, and raising related common knowledge, and has a career devotion to service.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s most recent honors include 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a 2022 National Book Award Finalist, a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist, an ASLE Book of the Year Finalist, and won the 2022-2023 Emory Elliott Book Award. In 2021, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters  and awarded the 2021 AWP George Garrett Award from AWP. Hedge Coke was selected for an inaugural Legacy Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council (2021-2022), and recently awarded the UCR Dean’s Mellon Professorship (2022-2023). An American Book Award winning author and 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow, she has written or edited 18 books and is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing for the University of California Riverside, where she directs UCR Writers Week Festival, directs the Medical Health and Humanities Designated Emphasis in the School of Medicine, where she teaches Death and Dying and Narrative Medicine,  and is affiliated faculty for the newUCR  department of Society, Health Equity, and Sustainability. Her eighth authored book is Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, 2022) and tenth edited book is Effigies III.