Alison Peiegrin

Alison Pelegrin, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2023-2025, has served at Southeastern as an Instructor and now as Writer-in-Residence since 2002. She earned a BA, including an honors diploma, and an MA in English at Southeastern and went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. At Southeastern, she is the two-time recipient of the President's Award for Artistic Excellence, and in 2024 was named the College of Honors and Excellence distinguished alumna.

She is a member of the Graduate faculty, the Honors faculty, and, in addition to her work with creative writing students, within the Department of English and World Languages, she chairs the Common Read Committee, which each semester brings a distinguished author to campus to meet with gen ed and upper division students who have studied their work. Topics of her honors and upper division classes include The Art and Science of Creativity, The Poetic Sequence, Memory and Narrative, Prison Literature, and The Evolution of Form in American Poetry.

Alison is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work has received fellowships and recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents in the form of an ATLAS Grant, and the Foundation for Louisiana. Her work is widely anthologized, including in Scribner's Best American Poetry 2025, and The Southern Review, the Academy of American Poets, and the Library of Congress have featured her nonfiction. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Big Muddy River of Star, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, and, more recently, Waterlines (2016) and Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022), both with LSU Press. 

Alison's two-year tenure as Louisiana Poet Laureate ends in August 2025. While serving in this capacity, Alison established the Lifelines Poetry Project and, with support from the Foundation for Louisiana and a Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, was able to facilitate workshops in prisons and justice-impacted communities across Louisiana. She remains committed to broadening opportunities for incarcerated readers, writers, and learners. 

Alison lives in Covington with her husband, Bryan Davidson, and they are the proud parents of Ben, a 2024 graduate of LSU, and Sam, a 2025 graduate of LaTech. In her downtime, Alison may be found walking the dog, reading a book, stitching on a detailed needlework project, or revising a poem.