Allen Gee
Professor, Department of English, Columbus State University, GA.
Allen Gee was born in Astoria, Queens and raised in New York. He earned a B.A. in Secondary English Teaching at the University of New Hampshire where he studied with novelists Thomas Williams and John Yount. He studied for his M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where his mentor was the late James Alan McPherson, and Gee is now James’ designated biographer. Gee earned his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Houston. He has two daughters, Ashley and Willa.
Gee’s My Chinese-America, a collection of essays was a prize winner for SFWP’s national contest, judged by Lee Gutkind, and was published by SFWP in 2015. The essays drew the attention of Kirkus Reviews: “In this collection of essays, Gee engagingly probes his thoughts about living as a man of Chinese origin in the United States.” And Publishers Weekly concluded: “In this perceptive, honest and deeply probing set of essays, Gee, an English professor at Georgia College, explores the heightened self-consciousness Asian Americans feel as a result of living in a country where American is still often conflated with white.”
Gee is at work on At Little Monticello, the biography of writer James Alan McPherson. McPherson won the Pulitzer for the short story collection, Elbow Room, and was the longest tenured faculty member in prose at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Gee is currently the D.L. Jordan Distinguished Chair of Creative Writing at Columbus State University. He taught from 2004-2018 at Georgia College where he directed the undergraduate creative writing concentration and the college's M.F.A. program. He has been the Editor of the literary journal Gulf Coast, the Fiction and Flash Fiction Editor for the literary journal Arts & Letters, and the Editor Emeritus of the multicultural imprint, 2040 Books. His experience also includes being the Director of Development for the arts education nonprofit organization, Writers in The Schools in Houston, TX.