Alison Rollins isn’t just an assistant professor teaching in UW–Madison’s creative writing program; she’s also a trained librarian and a self-proclaimed “archive nerd” and “reading nerd.” And as of April 2026, she’s also a Whiting Award–winning poet. Her collection Black Bell earned her a $50,000 prize from one of the most renowned literary honors in America — something of a surprise for a Midwesterner.
“When you go to New York to get a prestigious award, no one’s really giving Wisconsin a shout-out,” she says. “I feel a lot of pride in terms of repping the Midwest and bringing attention to other areas of the country that are often downplayed or under-recognized.”
When writing Black Bell, Rollins leaned into history and her avant-garde aesthetic — and she put her nerdity on display.
When did you first know you were a poet?
It was in high school. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, and we would do traditional grammar tests, breaking down and diagramming sentences. I never properly understood how that works, so I would often fail my grammar exams and have to do office hours with one particular English teacher, Mrs. Noeli Lytton. We created a relationship, and I showed her my journal — emotional musings — and she said, “I guess these are poems.” These brief fragments of lyric, emotional exploration of feelings were the earliest stages of poetry for me.
Who were your inspirations?
My dad gave me a collected edition of Langston Hughes poetry, and that, along with an English class where we read Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” those were my introduction to exposure to something like my aesthetic. Those are the earliest seeds. And [when I was in college] HBO had a show called Def Poetry Jam. I got a DVD, and I would watch that. It felt like, in this faraway land that’s New York City, there were people gathering to recite and perform poems in a way that I found more invigorating, more fresh, more contemporary.
Do you consider yourself a spoken word poet?
No, at my core I’m a reader, a reading nerd, but that is not to say that the written word is antithetical to the oral tradition. I also have a degree in library science, so I’m also an archive library nerd. I really value, respect, and appreciate the performance aspect of spoken word, but I’m a book nerd, so I just sit quietly, check out all the latest books at the library in the poetry section and devour them or sit and engage with them. I did try with Black Bell, though, to lean into capitalizing on the performance art aspects of live poetry readings and to also create a more experimental as well as playful experience for readers.
Where did the inspiration for Black Bell come from?
At the core of this collection, what ended up being the centering touchstone, is an archival image of a woman in the 19th-century who was wearing a particular iron contraption as punishment for attempting to run away. I was in the New York Public Library’s digital collection, looking for images or examples of enslaved people who had freed themselves. I became obsessed with this image and was ruminating on it and writing poems in conversation with that woman across space and time. [The book] has a lot of 19th-century archival examples of Black fugitivity or Black persons trying to move toward freedom and liberation, given their context.
But then you went beyond archives, right?
A lot of my work deals heavily with contemporary music and even more with sound production. For this collection, I went to a steelyard and worked with iron and learned to weld. I actually created the contraption [that the woman in the archival photo wore], and I wear it in performance.
Who nominated Black Bell for the Whiting?
I don’t know. The Whiting is one of the rare, mysterious prizes in the literary world. You don’t nominate yourself. Your press does not submit or nominate you. There’s an anonymous selection of judges that choose writing across genres that they feel is reflective of innovation or future promise. They gather secretly over the course of, I think, months to get down to a small list, and they pick winners. There were 10 of us total, across nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. I was one of two poetry winners.
How did you find out Black Bell had won the Whiting?
I was sent an email [saying I’d won], and I just thought it was a joke. There are so many AI-generated emails that regurgitate your Amazon blurb and try to sell you something. I didn’t think it was real. When we [Whiting Award recipients] gathered in New York, we all joked that the announcement email had gone to our spam filter.
What does being a prizewinner change for you as a poet?
Well, the $50,000 is nice. You don’t make a lot of money on poetry. But just to be acknowledged for a project that I put a lot of work and effort into — creatively, in research — to be compensated for that and to feel that the work is deserving is incredible. It also felt like a win for this region and very affirming for me that I’m doing work that is meaningful and important.
What do you do to try to inspire your students?
My personal aesthetic is more experimental and avant-garde, so I often ask students to disrupt grammar to think about subversive ways of delivering content. I want them to think about ways to express themselves that feel freeing and not antiquated or calculated. I don’t want them worrying about being perfect or getting it right.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a nonfiction book. I was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, before moving to Madison, working as a librarian and creative writing instructor. And I took a survival course in Arizona. You hear a lot of rhetoric about doomsday prepping. There, in the grocery store, you’ll see people with guns, and that Western experience was interesting to me. So I took a survival class and lived off the grid for 14 days — no tents, no toilets, no toilet paper, learning to purify water and tell time by the sun and live off the land. And so [the book will] look at survival narratives and their relationship to motherhood, mental health, and trauma.
And your next poetry project?
I may challenge myself to write a collection of sonnets — to follow form, but to write in a subversive, sexy, racy way and focus on the concept of pleasure. It will give me some relief from nonfiction and allow me to also try to continue to center seeking joy in my creative practice.
