Cockefair Writer in Residence Presents
Maya Angelou Book Award Presentation and Reading
By Alison C. Rollins
Date: Wednesday, Mar. 11th, 2026
Time:
Reception: 5:30pm
Program: 6:00pm
Location: Central Library
14 W. 10th St., Kansas City, MO 64105
Cockefair Lecture Activity led by Alison C. Rollins
Date: Thursday, Mar. 12th, 2026
Time: 10:30am to 12:30pm
Location: UMKC, Cockefair Hall, Room 105
5121 Rockhill Road
Kansas City, MO 64110
*These events are free to the public and no registration is required.
About the Speaker
Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, holds a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University, a Master of Library and Information Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Science from Howard University. Rollins was named a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow in 2019. In 2021, her essay “Dispatch from the Racial Mountain” was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere.
A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, Rollins is the author of “Black Bell” (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) and the debut poetry collection “Library of Small Catastrophes” (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) which was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Rollins has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
