Meet 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow Jada Renée Allen
Poetry as devotion and survival—Jada Renée Allen writes toward liberation, memory, and imagined futures beyond violence.
Photo courtesy of the poet
Leading up to the 2025 Ruth Lilly-Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows' reading in Miami on Friday, April 10 as part of O, Miami's Poetry Festival, we will feature profiles of each of the five fellows. We are excited to continue introducing you to and celebrating these outstanding young poets.
To 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow Jada Renée Allen, poetry is like water–a physical necessity. It is both cathartic and somatic, and helps her articulate herself and understand the world around her. “It helps me understand what it’s like to feel for alternative futures where settler-colonial violence doesn’t exist, and to hope for those futures,” she says. Poetry is devotional–it is a way for her to interact with the divine. Allen has been writing since she was 12, and realized poetry would be a major part of her life after winning a district-wide poetry contest in high school. She has also participated in slam and spoken word poetry events.
Allen is currently based in the US-occupied O’odham, Hohokam, and Yavapai lands, also known as Phoenix, Arizona. She didn’t initially connect with the perpetual summer of the desert, but has a deep appreciation for the monsoon season. “There’s a kind of magic here that’s taken me time to recognize, but now that I do, it’s hard to imagine leaving it behind,” she says.
Allen is originally from the South Side of Chicago, which features heavily in much of her poetry. She is currently working on her debut collection, Drill, exploring the interconnected affiliations of torture and dehumanization and settler-colonial violence and militarization in the United States military and the Chicago Police Department. She’s inspired by poets like Krista Franklin and avery r. young, who work with both poetry and visual media, as well as Patricia Smith, who she studied with at Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) in 2017.
Thinking about Chicago has been an important part of Allen’s poetry, especially after moving to Phoenix. “Returning home to Chicago in my mind—rarely physically—yielded really powerful discoveries about things I’d forgotten or suppressed,” she says. “Returning to those moments, reliving them, and articulating them in a different way than just factually has been beneficial to my writing practice in terms of the lyric of experience and vulnerability.”
Allen practices a method of writing she calls “controlled abandon,” inspired by Gregory Pardlo, where if a poem or project she’s writing isn’t working, she’ll abandon it for weeks, months, or even years before revisiting it. “Sometimes when I abandon a poem for years, it’s because I didn’t have the experience to finish it,” she says. “I really enjoy that process where I can take my time, where it feels intimate.” She often takes breaks from writing, during which she spends time reading and watching movies. Even when she’s not writing, she’s thinking about it–going out in nature, having conversations with friends and loved ones, and absorbing external energy. She quotes Susan Sontag: “Literature needs lots of people. It’s enough to honor the project.” She has found that having difficult conversations with beloveds who share her intersections, and how best to love each other, has been important to her artistic practice.
To other young poets, Allen says, “Take your time.” She believes in the value of having time as an artistic collaborator to gather life experiences. “The younger me couldn’t have written the poems I’m writing now,” she says. “I had to learn certain things, not just about the craft, but about myself over time.” These revelations about the self and the experiencing of life, she says, can be an integral part of the creative process.
When asked what she would like people to know, Allen says, “Free Palestine. Kôngo kele kimakulu—the Congo will live forever. Free Sudan, free Haiti, and free oppressed people everywhere from settler-colonialist regimes of power that attempt to strip us of our dignity, humanity, and livelihood. These regimes will come tumbling down. Free all oppressed people everywhere. That’s what I’d like folks to know.”
Roma Uzzaman (she/her) earned a Master of Arts in the humanities, with an English and creative writing focus, from the University of Chicago. Uzzaman was the summer 2025 Grants and Awards Intern at the Poetry Foundation. Previously, she worked as an assistant with Shakespeare in the Arb. Uzzaman earned a BA in English and psychology from The University of Michigan, where she was awarded the Virginia...