WRITING & REVIEWS

 "...Allen compassionately examines themes of community and criminal justice reform in this affecting, noirish debut." KEEP READING HERE 

 "Before George Floyd was murdered, I had never heard of this man, Gordon Granger this white union soldier who announced to enslaved people in Texas that they had been freed," KEEP READING HERE 

 "What makes a dystopia? Must evil be its driving force, or could there be a less sinister foundation, akin to a dysfunctional family gone awry?" KEEP READING HERE 

 "I met Amin Ahmad at a fiction-writing workshop at The New School in New York City, where he quickly rose to stardom. " KEEP READING HERE 

My grandpa, who everyone called Papa, owned and worked his own farm and, in his spare time (which he can’t have had much of with nine children), he ran the molasses mill in the town, where he turned stalks of sugar cane into hot molasses for anybody who brought him their crop. When my mom and her siblings grew up, most of them became a part of the great migration, in which thousands of Black people fled the segregated South to start new lives in the North. Papa missed his children sorely and made sure that all nine of them visited often and brought their own children with them. He didn’t ask much when we visited– just a few quiet minutes sitting next to him under the car port. And like my favorite characters in books, he was always ready with a story.