Jackson Allers

Throughout his career, American writer and music enthusiast Jackson Allers has worn many hats, among them: archivist, storyteller, reporter, filmmaker, and editor. Allers has focused the majority of his work on the subcultures of his surroundings, having documented the plight of farm workers in rural North Carolina with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles, advocated for the legal rights of the Roma population in Kosovo as the media adviser to the former Ombudsman, Marek Antoni Nowicki, and created digital-audio archives for a book on ancient Bedouin stories in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

For the last 7-plus years, Allers has been residing here in the Middle East, swapping his native Houston, Texas for Beirut, Lebanon, where he has continued exploring subcultures, this time in the form of the ever-expanding Arab hip hop movement. Allers regularly covers all things regional hip hop on his blog Beats and Breath, and continues documenting all things arts and culture for various publications, as well as working on his own personal side-projects, and DJing as part of the Beirut Groove Collective.