Jude MacAllen Tatman is a Missouri poet, historian, and publican, born in Hannibal and raised on the family homestead along the west bank of the Mississippi River. He received his BA in History, with an English minor, from Northwest Missouri State University, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Writers Workshop.

Past vocations include work as a farmhand, union Ironworker’s hand (Local 577, Burlington, Iowa), deckhand working on the barges of towboats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, pizza delivery driver while also playing a season and a half of semi-pro baseball in West Texas. He's been a waiter and bartender, corporate sales and marketing, and an archivist/historian for Missouri State Parks.

He also lost on Jeopardy.

MacAllen and his wife, Marilee, own and operate Paddy Malone’s Irish Pub in Jefferson City, where they live with a brace of bird dogs on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River in a century-old bungalow that belongs to a couple of somewhat ornery cats.