Questionnaire 1: Allison Pitinii Davis

Site co-founder Allison Pitinii Davis tackles the questionnaire!

Allison Pitinii Davis

Name

Allison Pitinii Davis

What was your experience navigating academia? What factors impacted your journey? 

I think this story is a good metaphor for how I navigated academia: There was a time at Stanford where all of the writers in my workshop were invited to submit poems to Louise Glück and then meet with her one-on-one to discuss them. Louise Glück was one of my idols; I took the invitation as a joke. Later, I found out that I was the only one who didn’t submit work.

Why did I think it was a joke? Because I thought it was too good to be true. I thought that the program was just being nice and no one would actually think their work was worthy of Louise Glück’s time. I assumed if I actually submitted work the program would laugh at me behind my back for being so naïve. Like a lot of first-gen students, I was terrified of appearing naïve.

So most of my issues in academia were unintentional self-sabotage. I just naturally assumed no one would take me seriously, so I didn’t take myself seriously to avoid embarrassment. I couldn’t afford to have any weak points that others could pull me down by. I was all armor, all the time, and the few times I cracked, it was terrifying. I went on like this for years, holding myself to impossibly high standards while also accepting I was inherently a piece of shit. (Edit: Since writing this, I've also received an ADHD diagnosis at age 39! Which is also tied to first-gen student and ethnic, working-class family issues--I was raised in a culture that stigmatized mental healthcare.)

The number one thing that got me through academia was conversations behind closed doors where people admitted the toll academia took on them. I hope if we normalize having these conversations publicly it might lead to systemic change.

What advice do you have/what do you wish you knew?

The current, flawed version of you is enough--you don't need to arrive at an aspirational version of yourself to be enough.

Getting there has required me developing healthy relationship with shame. This, I think, comes from growing up the oldest daughter in a traditional, ethnic family that ran a trucking motel—there was an implicit sense that anything I did wrong would bring shame on my whole family. That people assumed that my siblings and I wouldn’t make anything of ourselves, or that there was something generally disreputable about us. I’m 39—I think I spent most of my life just trying to be respectable, to bring honor (nachas, in Yiddish) to my family at any cost. Which, in my family, mostly consisted of getting married and having kids. I love my family and they didn’t mean to put any pressure on me—it was something I think oldest children just intuit, that their family’s dignity is sort of riding on them.

Anyway, I went overboard. I self-abandoned for perfection. Very Black Swan! But now I finally feel like I made it enough that I can now be like, ok, underneath of the performance, who am I? And who I am is everything I’ve repressed behind shame. So getting to myself has been excruciating, just like admitting to myself how much I wanted things yet denied myself because I was so afraid of how much it would hurt to not get them. Because I thought it would expose my inherent unworthiness--"You grew up in a family in Ohio that ran a trucking motel--you're stupid for expecting more." And also guilt, "Who are you that you think your life should work out when it doesn't for most people?" And I didn't just get this message from growing up lower-middle-class--I got this message from being Jewish--like as long as you're not in a concentration camp, shame on you for even wanting more. Like it was an intersectional "who do you think you are that you should get what you want in life?"

Anyway, poetry is how I approach shame. The page is a safe place to face yourself. And a safe place to store all of the hope and idealism I've had since I've been a child--poetry is a place where I could sort of harbor it so reality couldn't get to it. Slowly, I started to really admire my shame, its bravery. It’s insistence on hope. Where I allow myself to even notice that I have desires. To admit things to myself. Today’s Allison would have submitted work to Louise Glück even if everyone laughed in my face because my respect for my art is finally bigger than my fear of looking ridiculous. I’m finally much more afraid of disappointing myself than others. I think a big part of teaching art is giving others permission to develop a healthier relationship to their shame.

I should also add that one thing that helped mitigate my shame is finally--after over a decade of trying while also being in a regionally-bound two-body problem with kids--getting a creative writing job. Which I acknowledge is a major privilege--it's easy to love poetry when the field loves you back, but there are few jobs, and the field needs to do a better job supporting poets who understandably have a difficult relationship with poetry if they worked to get a job and didn't, especially if they don't have money to fall back on. Before I got a job, I was getting pretty bitter, like why should I care about the field if the field doesn't care about me? Which I know is a horrible thought, but I think it's important to unpack--we hear a lot from poets who have "made it," but I think we also can learn a lot (perhaps the most) about poetry from people who stuck with it without the momentum of the success machine. I often think of Philip Levine's quote about this:

"I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able. Don’t kiss anyone’s ass. Wait and be discovered or don’t be discovered. I think I did it the hard way. I didn’t kiss anyone’s ass; I waited a long time; I didn’t go to a school that would give me advantages. I didn’t publish a book that anyone read until I was forty. But to be utterly honest, I think if something hadn’t happened about then I might have become a very bitter man. It was getting to me. If I’d had to wait until I was fifty I don’t know what lousy things I might have done." -Philip Levine

I think it's also important to work with shame because, as we've seen politically, we have a cultural epidemic of people who deal with shame by suppressing others. So I think cultivating healthier relationships with shame is vital--and I think lower classes often don't have access to resources or cultural narratives that even begin to allow many people to approach it. It sometimes requires privilege to even unpack shame.

Has being a first-gen student had any advantages to your journey and/or your art?

This entire project was actually born out of a conversation I was having with a professor from a non-academic background. She told me I was able to convey ideas efficiently in the classroom and in my poems, and I told her it wasn’t because I was a smart—it was because I came from busy, non-academic parents, and I knew if I wanted to get an idea across to them, I had about 30 seconds of their time, so I needed to be clear and quick. I grew up in a family where you get to the point. The professor looked back at me with total recognition that it was like this for her, too. It’s one of the most important pedagogy conversations I’ve ever had, and I’ve sat through hours and hours of pedagogical trainings.

So much of what first-gen students are innately coming to the table with as students, writers, teachers, etc. is so valuable, and while academia might never acknowledge it, it matters that students who have it understand its worth. That for every skill that they don’t come to the table with, they are bringing something else that is equally useful.

This is of course also true of first-gen Americans, like my grandparents--they didn't have the educational opportunities that I had--especially the women--but they were the smartest, more resourceful, most creative thinkers I've known. And my grandfather did end up getting a college degree as an adult learner.

And to press a bit more on intersectionality--if I was born a boy, then I would have probably taken over my family's motel and not gone the poetry route. I would have been raised to take it over. Instead, because I was a girl, my dad would say to me and my sisters, "Work hard or else you'll clean motel toilets when you grow up." And he said this sort of as a joke, as he himself has cleaned endless motel toilets and is very proud of his work, as are we. And I'll also say that, as someone who has cleaned some motel toilets in my time, there are many times when I found much more dignity in cleaning a motel toilet than in academia.

This all shapes how I think about teaching and universal design—how can I design courses that allow everyone to bring their full selves to the conversation? What visible and invisible barriers do I need to dismantle to allow people in? Who was born knowing how to come in, and who doesn't even know what direction to head in? And should we be directing students towards success or dismantling success?

Can you share an anecdote of a time when you especially felt your background impacted your experience in academia?

I was once told by a famous poet that my work is interesting because “you don’t meet many poor Jews.” The person meant it sincerely—I think they were just trying to say that my work investigates interesting intersections of cultural identity and class—but seeing that there is an entire strain of Jewish literature that does exactly that, I hardly think that makes my work innovative, and the stereotype that all Jews are rich and powerful is obviously an old and dangerous anti-Semitic trope.

At the time when it was said, I just totally froze. I didn’t know how to respond. Now, I wish I would have talked about it with the poet. Jews, like all groups, have diverse and complex histories that I imagine are rightfully hard to understand from outside—I am trying to be better at understanding the assumptions behind people’s comments instead of being hurt by them. Turn it into dialogue. To acknowledge my own ignorance. We all can learn so much from each other.

How would you like to see the creative writing world change?

Transparency. What if we noted solicited poems so poets who were just starting out didn’t feel so bad about rejections? I do this in every class I teach, go through my bio and point out what I got through connections. Demystify success. Or, even better, dismantle conventional success. Less competition, more cooperation. Less elite awards, more equal wealth distribution. Clear paths to post-MFA employment. A culture where poets can focus on art and the very critical benefits it brings to the world instead of worrying about how to afford basic shelter. Rodrigo Toscano's "Six Problematics in Contemporary American Poetry."

I say this as a hypocrite who has benefited from major fellowships—a lot of my forthcoming book Another Architecture is about the strangeness of the part of my life where I went from working counter jobs to elite poetry fellowships then back to adjuncting comp in a short span of years. It was like capitalism shot me up out of a cannon and then I crashed back down. It was interesting. It was so absurd and clearly beyond my control that I often felt like I was watching it all from outside of myself. I think a lot about the bell hooks-Beyoncé debate—is the goal to dismantle capitalism or get to the top of it? I ideologically believe in bell hooks, but the psyche of my generation owes so much to Beyoncé. I think there can be many sincere paths to more equitable and inclusive systems.

Tell us about your own publications and projects.

I have a poetry book about my family’s lineage and small businesses called Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab, 2017); a novella about the nightlife of working-class women on the eve of Youngstown's deindustrialization called Business, which is part of Agency 3: Novellas (Baobab, 2025), and a forthcoming hybrid book about the global Rust Belt, the 1972 General Motors Lordstown strike, and psychogeography. I call this my "postgenre/postindustrial/postpartum" collection.

Other writers/artists you'd like to highlight?

Some of the artists whose work and/or company helped me think through a lot of these issues include Takako Arai, James Baldwin, Andrew Butler, Elena Ferrante, Matthew Ferrence, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Simone Di Piero, Jack Gilbert, Kathy Fagan Grandinetti, Joy Harjo, Ian Hall, bell hooks, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Rochelle Hurt, Emily Jalloul, Marilyn Kallet, Leslie Kaplan, Mani Leib, Philip Levine, Layli Long Soldier,  Lo Kwa Mei-en, Erika Meitner, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller, Matthew Neill Null, Joy Priest, Frank Rashid, Paisley Rekdal, Charles Reznikoff, Philip Roth, Amy Ritter, Phil Terman, Natasha Trethewey, Karen Schubert, Nikka Singh, Sean Singer, Anthony Veasna So, Essy Stone, Rodrigo Toscano, Claire Vaye Watkins, and more. (If we've talked about this I didn't include your name, it's me trying to type this while parenting toddlers, not you!) This project wouldn't exist without Kimberley Grey and Rosanna Young Oh--I wrote them an email that was like "here's a strange Allison idea!" and being me, I expected them to write back, "yep...pretty fucking strange." But instead they were like "let's do it."

Bio

Allison Pitinii Davis, PhD, is the author of the hybrid collection Another Architecture, selected for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2028); Business from Agency 3: Novellas (Baobab Press, 2025); the poetry collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab, 2017); and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), selected for the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her creative writing and scholarship are forthcoming from or have appeared in Best American Poetry, POETS.org, The Oxford American, The Georgia Review, The New Republic, Studies in Jewish American Literature, and elsewhere. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Ohio State University, where she was named the 2025-2026 English Graduate Organization Professor of the Year. She was born in Youngstown, Ohio.

Identify as a first-gen (student/and or American) or as a writer exploring class and academic access? Interested in taking the questionnaire? Contact us on our website for more information!