Born in New York City, Allison is a memoirist, biographer, historian and Africanist. She is also a traveler and explorer—Ghana, South Africa, Algeria, France and Russia—and has spent more than twenty-five years in Britain. She is, moreover, the daughter of a missing person.

Allison’s latest book, Searching for My Missing Father: An American Noir (Black Rose Writing, 2020), is about her lived experience of being connected to a missing person. Her memoir traces her efforts to discover what happened to her father during the twenty-six hours between his last conversation with a family member and the report that he was missing—in other words, to find the truth behind her father’s still unresolved vanishing.