A deeply wrought and joyful debut poetry collection from an exciting new voice

Looping exultantly through the overlapping experiences of girlhood, Blackness, sex, and personhood in America, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen braids together personal narrative and cultural commentary, wrestling with the beauty and brutality to be found between mothers and daughters, young women and the world, Black bodies and white space, virginity and intrusion, prison and freedom, birth and death. Most of all, The Collection Plateexplores both how we collect and erase the voices, lives, and innocence of underrepresented bodies-and behold their pleasure, pain, and possibility

Both formally exciting and a delight to read, The Collection Plateis a testament to Allen's place as the voice of a generation-and a witness to how we come into being in the twenty-first century.

Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She is the recipient of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction for her essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet, awarded by Kiese Laymon. She has been featured on C-SPAN, interviewed in The Rumpus and Poets & Writers, and her work has been taught by New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds alongside that of Jamaica Kincaid and Eve Ewing, among other distinctions. She is the author of The Collection Plate.