Jabari Jawan Allen

Biography

Jabari Jawan Allen is a recipient of the 2018 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholarship and the 2018 Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholarship. He has also received support from Tin House, Community of Writers, the Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) Foundation, and Poets House. Allen’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Four Chambers, the Shade Journal, Vinyl Poetry & Prose, and elsewhere.

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2018

Seed

By Jabari Jawan Allen

In January 2005, three-year-old Ronnie Paris III slipped into a coma when he fell asleep on a neighbor’s couch while his parents, Ronnie Paris Jr. and Nysheerah Paris, studied Bible verses with friends from church. The thin and unconscious...

POETRY / Summer 2018

When Thy King Is a Boy: Black Dance and the Question of Agency in the Quare Body

By Jabari Jawan Allen

Keywords: g-house, booty house, juke, percolator, bang-bang-bang, skeet-skeet-skeet

POETRY / Summer 2018

The Soul Wishes It Could Blow on the Wound

By Jabari Jawan Allen

His teeth are lilies bursting from asphalt—white, many petaled opulences;
amid danger, there is also beauty. When he whips me with the riding crop
of his tongue, I curl into the earth’s first question: To desire what exactly?
                 ...

POETRY / Summer 2018

Nocturne

By Jabari Jawan Allen

Daddy was a slick devil, so he must have thought my sister his
succubus; a mud-bone Lilith, her lurid tresses struck shut with
igneous flicker when it happened in the black. His cinereous 

peepers, glazed over moons which pierced through...

POETRY / Summer 2018

Pastoral

By Jabari Jawan Allen

Two tree-limb-switched heretics born of Baptist parents, we reveled in a Ouija. But the only black spirits we conjured were our own shadows which flickered against the wall like a private screening. Both of us church boys sweltered in June...