About The Truth About Tigers
Hey, there. My name is Nick. Thanks for stopping by. This site started as a place to post poems, but it’s grown into a kind of creative catch-all. Poems, occasional musings, songs, and whatever else I happen to write. Nothing here has much to do with actual tigers, except maybe that they don’t mean to be rude.
Obligatory Third-Person Bio, in Which the Author Justifies His Existence by Listing Accomplishments of Questionable Importance:
Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and a writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in HuffPost, The Chaos Section, The Shore, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Fulcrum, Eunoia Review, The New Verse News, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, MasticadoresUSA, and a few other places that were kind enough to say yes.
He occasionally posts poems here at The Truth About Tigers and recently edited Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age, a political poetry collection published by TCS Press (2025).
A slightly left-of-center independent with a deep distrust of all ideologies (including his own) and a mild allergy to political labels, Nick spends too much time reading about history, democracy, authoritarian drift, and systems in collapse—and not nearly enough time being optimistic about any of it. He writes poems, essays, and the occasional op-ed about politics, culture, religion, and philosophy—mostly to make sense of the mess, or at least make light of it.
When he’s not writing or working, he’s probably hanging out with his lovely wife of twenty-two years and their two amazing kids, reading, listening to Robert and Steve call Astros games on the radio, trail running with his dog, Lily, or loitering in local coffee shops under the guise of productivity.
He’s also managed to collect a few certifications over the years (that may or may not still be current) that he doesn’t actually use to make money, including credentials as a certified meditation and mindfulness teacher, personal trainer, sports nutrition specialist, and positive psychology practitioner, along with completion of the Red Cross First Aid for Severe Trauma (FAST) course. He went through the courses mostly out of curiosity and a desire for self-improvement, figuring they might make him a slightly better human, runner, or meditator—or at least someone marginally more useful in an emergency—though maybe not in that order.
Ever since discovering the Mac shortcut for the em dash way too late in life, he’s been abusing it—constantly—and has no plans to stop. Also, he secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, probably because it makes him feel a little smarter and more important than he actually is.
The Truth About Tigers 