Below is a response to Furious Flower’s 25th Anniversary Celebration from former and current HBW staff members and affiliates: Portia Owusu, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor / ACES Fellow of English in the Department of English at Texas A&M University: The second day of the celebration demonstrated the community aspect of the Furious Flower Center since activities involved both invited guests and the general public. The […]
Furious Flower Poetry Center has been at the forefront of Black poetry for 25 years. As the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry, Furious Flower was founded on the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and born out of a 1994 poetry festival titled “Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry,” organized by scholar Joanne Gabbin. The festival brought thirty presenters […]
[By: Shayna S. Israel] The Furious Flower Poetry Center has held biennial summer legacy seminars since 2009 (with a hiatus in 2013 and 2015), a focused opportunity to study the work of a living poet. Beginning with Lucille Clifton, seminars have been held on Sonia Sanchez (2011) and Yusef Komunyakaa (2017). As the nation’s only center devoted to Black poetry, Furious Flower’s choice of […]
[by Simone Savannah] There are no words—no poems–to adequately describe the experience of the Furious Flower conference. To be there was an honor. To hear poets read and scholars discuss was an immersion into the past and the future of African American poetry. We were treated to Rita Dove two-stepping down a Soul Train line; we stood next to Nikki Giovanni and heard Sonia Sanchez […]