Justin Allen

Justin was born in Boise, Idaho in 1974. He grad­u­ated from Boise State Uni­ver­sity with a degree in phi­los­o­phy, and from Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity with an MFA in fic­tion. Justin can also be found at www.facebook.com/JustinAllenauthor, and loves to hear from inter­est­ing readers.

While at Colum­bia, Justin was first intro­duced to Uruk, a pre­his­toric hunter from the jun­gles of sub-Saharan Africa, and the hero of his first novel, “Slaves of the Shi­nar.” Nisi Shawl, in the Seat­tle Times, wrote the fol­low­ing about the book: “With a dri­ving plot and an excel­lent eye for liv­ing, breath­ing, tac­tile detail, author Allen brings imme­di­acy to this mod­ern ver­sion of the Gil­gamesh leg­end while keep­ing it in con­text with the rest of the not-necessarily-white world of thou­sands of years ago.”

Build­ing on that suc­cess, Justin wrote “Year of the Horse,” an all-ages fan­tasy cowboy-western pub­lished in Octo­ber 2009. “Year of the Horse” tells the story of sixteen-year-old Yen Tzu-lu, the child of Chi­nese immi­grants and one of a band of trea­sure hunters brought together from every cor­ner of the con­ti­nent to recap­ture a stolen gold mine. Lead­ing Tzu-Lu and his gang is the gun­slinger Jack Straw, a fig­ure who is as much leg­end as real­ity, as much magic as lead. Ulti­mately, this band of out­siders finds it must learn to live together, trust and care for one another. If they make it across a wild con­ti­nent, they’ll be rich; if they don’t, they’ll surely be dead. The Col­orado Springs Inde­pen­dent calls the book, “Charm­ing and full of heart… like a secret dis­cov­ery from the dusty back shelf of a library,” while the Philadel­phia Weekly press just calls it “Lots of fun.”

Justin is also an active dancer, hav­ing per­formed with such com­pa­nies as Dances Patrelle, Eidolon Bal­let, and Idaho Dance The­atre. In 2009, his work in writ­ing and dance came together in the form of a new bal­let, “Mur­der at the Masque: The Case­book of Edgar Allan Poe,” with chore­og­ra­phy by Fran­cis Patrelle, music by Patrick Soluri, and all based upon an orig­i­nal story by Justin Allen. For 2010 he has been com­mis­sioned to pro­duce a sec­ond story for bal­let, this time for Eidolon Bal­let, to be called “The Beat­i­tudes,” which will be chore­o­graphed by Melanie Cortier.

He is roughly six feet tall, weighs some­where around 185 pounds (often more, to his cha­grin), has dark-brown hair and eyes, and suf­fers from near-sightedness, motion-sickness, and a ten­dency to get angry at air­port per­son­nel. His wife, Day Mitchell, a licensed mas­ter social worker, is try­ing to help him over­come this last item, but finds the going hard.