Arts Directory

About

Gilbert Allen, a longtime resident of upstate South Carolina, is the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature Emeritus at Furman University, where he taught from 1977 until 2015. He has discussed literature and read his own work at public schools, colleges, literary festivals, writing workshops, and libraries throughout the Southeast. He has appeared frequently on South Carolina Public Radio, and he is listed prominently in Walter Edgar’s The South Carolina Encyclopedia. He was the 2002-2003 recipient of the South Carolina Literary Arts Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission, and his short stories were chosen for the South Carolina Fiction Project Prize on five occasions. In 2007 his sequence of poems “The Assistant” received the Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review, and in 2013 his short story “Trash” received Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXVII. He was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the state’s literary hall of fame, in 2014. In that same year, Measure Press published his sixth collection of poetry, Catma. In 2016 his collection of short stories, The Final Days of Great American Shopping, was published by USC Press.