Allen C. West

Allen C. West was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1930. His father, also born in Beirut, taught at the American University of Beirut for 40 years. In 1941, leaving his father behind, the family fled the threat of German invasion, traveling for five months via Jerusalem, Cairo, and Sydney to reach the U.S. He attended Phillips Academy and Princeton University, served for three years in the U.S. Army, and received a PhD in chemistry from Cornell University in 1961. In 1958 he married Emily Mountz in Weston, MA. After teaching chemistry at Williams College and Lawrence University from 1960 to 1994, he retired to Cambridge, MA, where his wife died in 1999. In 2003 he returned to Beirut to help the American University celebrate the renovation of Robert H. West Hall, built in 1913 and named for his grandfather, who taught there from 1883 until 1906. In 2007 he moved to Lexington, MA.

He began writing poetry in 1983, was a runner-up for the Grolier Poetry Prize in 1992, and won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press's chapbook competition in 2001 for "The Time of Ripe Figs." Since 1997, he has been a member of The Workshop for Publishing Poets directed by Barbara Helfgott Hyett in Brookline, MA.