Allison Carter is…

an LA-based writer and the author of A Fixed, Formal Arrangement (Les Figues Press) and Here Versus Elsewhere (Insert Blanc Press) as well as several shorter collections, including Sum Total (Eohippus Labs), All Bodies Are The Same and Have The Same Reactions (Blanc Press), Shadows Are Weather (Horse Less Press), and We All Are Afraid of Repeating Mistakes That I Have Already Made: Breakfast Poems (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has additionally been included in Diagram, Fence, The Best of Fence Anthology, Conjunctions, 5_Trope, P-Queue, Out of Nothing, Peacock Review, 3rd Bed, Word/For Word, H_NGM_N, Emohippus Greeting Cards, Gallatin Review, Joyland, and other journals.

Allison has developed creative writing programs for residential and inpatient eating disorder treatment, for adults with homelessness and severe mental illness, and for adolescents. She has also taught creative writing at the college level and has led workshops in many other settings.

She has been a resident at Millay Colony for the Arts, and holds an MFA from CalArts, an MSW from UCLA, and a BA in Comparative Literature with a focus in Literary Translation from Brown University.

Allison currently edits the web journal Permanent Ambivalence and works as a clinical social worker with a private psychotherapy practice.

“Allison Carter writes the small and indelible installments of domestic life; what fits in a pocket, a post-it, just below the radar. In lovely prose, she challenges us to imagine the bigger picture just outside the frame…”

—Thalia Field

“…Carter’s work is a struggle to dream itself into consciousness: to reel disjointed narrative fragments back into the room, the garage, the dream (wherever) while allowing parts of the narrator herself, (whatever), to escape and fly free. There is a movement from the connectedness that demands unconsciousness-formed-of-fear toward an unattached freedom from fear, generously rational in its solid irrational roots. What is foregrounded when ‘…he sneezes, black space comes out, some gets on me,…’; where is the subject if ‘…Can’t find what I’m doing written down,’, and what is authentic as ‘I pull on sweatpants that express my limbs.’ Carter asks us to forget the question. Stop yourself mid-order. Her ‘best version of time’ would be ‘getting things running by single moments,… and then the exchange.’

—Diane Ward

“I was reminded of Woolf, of Stein, of Diane Williams. I jotted these names: Renee Gladman, Thalia Field, Pamela Lu. A tradition of women writing. Of experimental prose. Or maybe Ben Marcus, okay, or Robbe-Grillet. But. None of these references felt exactly right.”

—Danielle Dutton