Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry

Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What's next for Black poetic expression?

ISBN-13: 9780810141544

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Publication Date: 01-17-2020

Pages: 480

Product Dimensions: 8.80h x 6.00w x 1.20d

Age Range: 22 - UP Years

JOANNE V. GABBIN is the executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and a professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of the critical biography Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition and a children's book, I Bet She Called Me Sugar Plum, and the editor of two previous Furious Flower anthologies, The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry and Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present. She also edited Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy and Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers.

LAUREN K. ALLEYNE is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit and Honeyfish. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Women's Studies Quarterly, Interviewing the Caribbean, and the Crab Orchard Review. Recent honors for her work include the 2018 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press, a 2017 Philip Freund Alumni Prize in Creative Writing (Cornell University), the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Prize, and a Picador Guest Professorship for Literature (University of Leipzig, 2015). She is the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an associate professor of English at James Madison University.