The Department of English is proud to present a reading slated at 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 4, at the Midtown Library. Nancy Allen, a member of the College of Business, will be reading from her first novel, Code of the Hills.
A native of the Missouri Ozarks, Nancy Allen, an attorney, is a Senior Instructor on the law faculty in the College of Business at Missouri State University. After receiving her undergraduate degree in English from Missouri State University, she entered law school, and received her Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri School of Law. Nancy practiced for fifteen years, serving as Assistant Missouri Attorney General and as Assistant Prosecutor in her native Ozarks.
When Nancy began her term as prosecutor in Greene County, Missouri, she was the sole female on the staff of attorneys; moreover, she was the second woman in all of Southwest Missouri to serve in that capacity. Upon taking her position, she was assigned an unprecedented number of sex cases, including offenses perpetrated against children, and became the leading sex crimes lawyer in the office. In her years in prosecution, she tried over thirty jury trials, including murder, rape, and incest. During that time, she served on the Rape Crisis Board and the Child Protection Team of the Child Advocacy Council.
Nancy continues to demonstrate her commitment to victims of sexual crime. She was recently named to the Board of Directors of the Victim Center, an agency which provides free counseling, crisis intervention, and advocacy services for children and adults who are victims of violent and sexual crime in Southwest Missouri. She served multiple terms as Board member for the Ozarks Counseling Center, another organization seeking to aid those in crisis.
Nancy lives in Southwest Missouri with her husband and two children. She is a contributor to the Real Estate Law Journal and co-author of a book for incoming college freshmen: Now You Tell Me! 12 College Students Share the Best Advice They Never Got. Code of the Hills, to be released by HarperCollins Publishing on April 15, 2014, is her first novel.
[This event will be streamed online at http://new.livestream.com/msu-coal/nancyallen.]