Line Study of a Motel Clerk: poems
Two families immigrate to America's Steel Valley and open a trucking motel and laundry. When the two disparate families become one, the new generation must examine what it means to endure in a place, a culture, a language, and a history.
Business: a novella
When the lives of auto factory worker Alexa Mavros and trucking motel innkeeper Lia Mazur become entwined after a chance encounter at a 1970s Youngstown nightclub, they become agents in each other’s liberation.
Bio
Allison Pitinii Davis, PhD, is the author of the poetry collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award, Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013) winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize, and Business, a novella in Agency 3: Novellas (Baobab, 2025). 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.​​
Another Architecture, her postindustrial/postgenre manuscript exploring global deindustrialization, the 1972 GM Lordstown autostrike, and postindustrial motherhood was a finalist for the 2025 National Poetry Series, the 2025 Helena Whitehill Award, and the 2025 X.J. Kennedy Prize. Read a selection from the collection at the Oxford American.
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Pronunciation: Pitinii is pronounced pih-TEE-nee, from the Greek "Ptinis."
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​​​Contact: allisonpitiniidavis [at] gmail [dot] com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​