Born and raised in South Carolina, Alyson moved to San Francisco in the fall of 2010 by way of Minneapolis and Brooklyn. As an undergrad at the College of Charleston, she managed a local record store and volunteered at the Gibbes Museum of Art where she was a mentor in their Poets and Painters Program for 3 years. She has worked for the literary magazines Conduit and Crazyhorse. She was also a founding editor for Dislocate and obtained long-term funding and national distribution for the journal, which she’s happy to say is still in effect. In NYC, she was a Publicist at the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux and worked on publicity campaigns for David Mamet, Ishmael Beah, Seamus Heaney, and many other authors. Recently, she was the Publicist for the first annual county-wide poetry festival O, Miami, which took over Miami for the month of April with an amazing mix of programming—from Merce Cunningham dancers to multi-lingual poems on public transit. She is currently the Marketing and Publicity Manager for City Lights Publishers. As one of this year’s EAP Fellows, she is looking forward to connecting with local arts organizations and building new relationships.