Press
“As I look back at all the art things I experienced in 2023, one of the shows that quietly stays with me was one in which the performer laid in bed for the entirety of the piece, barely moving… In “NET/WORK,” D. Allen’s voice could be heard as a voiceover, while their photographic and video images were seen projected behind their body. The voiceover relayed recent events in Allen’s life. Allen, who uses a wheelchair, had been struck by a car, their wheelchair destroyed. The documented images showed Allen working on the piece as they described processing and navigating that traumatic event and injury, while still considering how to adapt their project for the Red Eye iteration. I found myself drawn into the intensity, loss, grief, and endurance of Allen’s voice. While it illustrated a very specific experience of an individual, I somehow hold it in my own heart even now. That feeling of stasis, of anger, and of not knowing what comes next seems to spill over into our culture in the years following the mass grief of Covid, the existential dread of worsening climate crisis, two wars, and ongoing injustice around the world.”
“In 2023, Minnesota artists used art in all its forms to understand and challenge what was happening in the world,” Sheila Regan, MinnPost.com, 01/02/24
“Author interview with D. Allen,” Runestone Literary Journal staff, 11/11/2020
“Meet the Finalists” poetry panel with Chaun Webster – D. Allen, Su Hwang, Ed Bok Lee, and Steve Healey
“36 Finalists: D. Allen interview,” Minnesota Book Awards, 2020
“Wholeness Through Hybridity: a conversation with D. Allen,” Elæ Moss, 3/18/2019
2019-2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellows press release, 3/18/19
Oral history interview with D. Allen on their experience of the 2011 Madison Capitol protests, Joslyn Mink, 4/25/2013
Read/view D.’s work online
“Reimagining the body productive,” lyric essay, WalkerArt.org, 11/18/2020
Starlight Elsewhere virtual poetry reading with Roy G. Guzmán and D. Allen, 4/17/2020
“O Sister,” poem commissioned by the Voices of Hope choir of the Shakopee Women’s Prison, performed by the University of Minnesota Women’s Chorus, 2017
“Meet Me in the Garden,” “Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” “We were going to build a dark room,” Jet Fuel Review, 2017
“All of the notes play,” and “Great Plains,” Poets.org, 2017
“Power,” Poetry City USA Vol. 7, 2017
“The Rust Collection,” District Lit, 2017 Disability, Illness, and Medicine Issue
“Singing Bowl” & “Scapulimancy,” Rogue Agent Journal, Issues 16 & 15, 2016
“On Material,” craft essay, Black Warrior Review issue 43.1, 2016
CV
D. Allen // the body connected 