Professor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has garnered over a dozen of awards on her work, and has enjoyed fellowships and various residencies throughout her career. As a distinguished professor in the creative writing department at the University of California Riverside (UCR), she often teaches courses such as film and writing and sends out weekly emails to creative writing students when writing opportunities become available.
In an interview with The Highlander, she reminisced about her journey with writing, “[I] started writing [in] preschool. [My] older sister … remembers this very differently … She remembers me teaching myself to read … I remember her teaching me [the] sounds of letters, and how to use the letters for symbols so that she could write notes to me … But if you ask her, she will tell you I taught myself.”
Music and labor were two big influences on Professor Hedge Coke’s childhood. Her father was musically inclined, and it was in part his passions and actions that helped direct Professor Hedge Coke in her life path. Her father wrote plays during his undergraduate studies, though his interest faded when his college professor allegedly stole his work. Afterwards, her father pursued chemistry, Professor Hedge Coke stated, “He became a chemist, but he had grown up working in the fields. He raised us with his background, and so as a kid, I worked in the fields as well … I had a child labor permit by the time I was nearing middle school. From these early experiences, she explains how “labor became a very heavy influence in my work because it [was] the way [that] I perceive[d] the world.”
Growing up in a household filled with music, Professor Hedge Coke recalls how her father would write songs, eventually leading her to write one of her own. Her musical endeavors led her to create a garage band with a group of older kids. She revealed how “the creative impulse with writing all started there … That retains a huge influence on me … I’m very driven by sound, by musicality. Normally when I come to a new piece, I’ve been hearing music in my head for a while, and I’ll find the words that engage with it … music is a profound influence.” Taking her childhood with music and labor together, she saw a relationship between the influencing factors in her life. “If you’re doing hard manual labor and you have music in your head, the day passes … It does make the work more enjoyable and [tolerable].”
As she grew older, Professor Hedge Coke took classes at the local university and after her sister informed her about a former field worker retraining program, moved to Santa Paula in Ventura County after. The city of Ventura later hired Professor Hedge Coke at Ortega Adobe and Olivas Adobe, under their collections management team where she learned the history of California that she uses today in her work.
Professor Hedge Coke majored in creative writing and sculpture in a two-year program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. There, she met her mentor Arthur C. Sze, a Chinese-American poet. She continued, “He took us [students] under his wing and just allowed us to be who we were. [We] talked through the term that he uses for methodology, the luminous method, which has to do with finding each student’s forte — what makes them illuminate, their strong points, their gifts, their talents and focus on those as a teacher versus the things that they’re [students] having a hard time with.”
During the program, Professor Hedge Coke was able to publish her work on-campus. She wrote “The Year of the Rat,” a poem that describes her and her children’s experience with contracting the bubonic plague. Professor Hedge Coke expressed, “I wrote a third person piece about this woman getting bubonic plague with their children, because I didn’t want to say it was me, how embarrassing. I was still young enough to think that things you went through in life were embarrassments … toward the end [of the poem], I learned how to write [in] first person about it.”
After two years in the program, she began to think about graduate programs in creative writing and took the Graduate Records Examination (GRE), scoring in the 96th percentile in the country, earning her Master’s in Fine Arts in creative writing at Vermont College. Her journey in grad school led her to meet her thesis advisor and mentor, Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Mexican-American Poet Laureate.
Amiri Baraka, an American poet and another of Professor Hedge Coke’s mentors, aided her to create her first collection of poems during graduate school. She continued to publish work across genres, including fiction in Canada, but Professor Hedge Coke found herself leaning more on poetry, stating,“Poetry for me is like breathing.” Her debut collection of poems, “Dog Road Woman,” became a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.
Professor Hedge Coke continued to write more poetry and began her memoir during her work with a residency program known as MacDowell in 1996. She described her experience with the memoir, claiming it “almost killed me in many ways … You can write yourself into PTSD very quickly, which is what I did … At the end of [residency], I was, as my dad said, shell shocked. [He] was the one that convinced me to get counseling.”
Offering advice to writers, Professor Hedge Coke said, “I tell people in writing nonfiction … to be very careful. If you find yourself having [sudden] awareness of things you have no memory of before you began to write, proceed with caution. Take care of yourself … Don’t force things if you’re not ready.”
Fall 2023 marks Professor Hedge Coke’s return to campus as she has been remote since COVID-19. “[It was] hard for me to be with people in the room and I was so anxious. And I just shared it with them … [Students] were very patient with me, so I thank them for [that].” She explains her gratitude for her students as they have kept her active and in conversation during her time at UCR.
She also enjoys taking her undergraduate students to the botanical garden on-campus for writing exercises, inviting them to shows, or doing fieldwork with them. “Your writing happens in the world. I feel that [it] is very important for me to connect with my students on a very human level.”
Currently, Hedge Coke is putting together the 47th Annual Writer’s Festival alongside creative writing professor, Tom Lutz. “We’re bringing in about 50 authors for the students. I’m working with a fabulous crew, some [of them being] our graduate students [and] a couple of alumni.” Hedge Coke shared that the weeklong event will bring debut writers and seasoned writers like Quincy Troupe who was awarded the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. “Roberto Gonzalez is [also] another [recipient] of the Lifetime Achievement and the first UCR alum [to receive this award who will also attend].”
Hedge Coke will also be working on a commissioned essay on an anthology series that will be about writers with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). She has more poetry books planned, with one of them being a collection of selected works and plans to write her second memoir that will explore her mother’s later years.
