Alison Rollins
Author of
Outside: Fieldnotes for Living Beyond Survival (Penguin Random House / One World, 2025)
Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)
Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)
Alison C. Rollins holds a bachelor of science in psychology from Howard University, a master of library and information science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a master of fine arts from Brown University. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow. In 2021, her essay “Dispatch from the Racial Mountain” was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, the Brown Arts Institute, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She is the author of two books of poetry, Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) and her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) which was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee.
Rollins has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
books by Alison
Outside: Fieldnotes for Living Beyond Survival (Penguin Random House / One World, 2025)
A memoir-in-essays organized into the four basic elements of survival (shelter, fire, water and food) that traces the Author’s parallel journeys: an inner one, through the landscape of loss and the outer one, through the Author’s encounters with the natural world in which she uncovers radical resilience, self-reliance and the true art of living through the framework of learning outdoor survival skills.
Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)
Sweeping from the eighteenth century to futurist fabulations, Black Bell harmonizes poetry with performance art practices in an investigation of fugitivity. Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins’s Black Bell continues an exploration of cataloging individual experience and collective memory. As Rollins sets out to resuscitate and embody the archive, we see a chorus of historical figures like Eliza Harris, Henry “Box” Brown, and Lear Green; readers can listen in as Phillis Wheatley takes a Turing test or venture through Dante’s Inferno remixed with Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers. Poems travel across time and space, between the eighteenth century and futuristic fabulations, vibrating with fugitive frequencies, sounds of survival, and nerve-wracking notes tuned toward love and liberation. Black Bell navigates what it means to be both invisible and spectacle, hidden and on display, allowing lyric language to become the material for fashioning wearable sculptures akin to Nick Cave’s ”soundsuits”. Integrating performance art practices, metalwork, and sonic, Black Bell becomes multimedia meditation on freedom seeking, furthering the possibilities of both the page and the canvas of the poet’s body.
Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)
Like sunflowers turning towards the sun, readers will turn to this astounding poet. —Booklist (Starred Review)
Rollins’ debut is a book of dissonance, with race and women’s bodies proving two unyielding concerns throughout this…work. In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent. ―Publishers Weekly
Much-welcomed newcomer Rollins offers keen insights that librarians and their readers will appreciate —Library Journal
The range of Rollins’ poetic skill is remarkable. The result is a collection of poetry which is magnificently crafted, readable, and crucially important. ―New York Journal of Books
Some dense and haunting, Rollins’ poems are always precise and exacting of attention from the reader...The poems continue to give upon each reading. —Ms. Magazine