Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than a hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Justin Philip Reed, combined with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Evie Shockley, and Meta DuEwa Jones. 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, to ask, "What's next for Black poetic expression?

Furious Flower: African-American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present

Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin

The Furious Flower Conference of 1994 represented the largest gathering of African American writers at one event in nearly thirty years. In that crucial span of time, African American poetry had evolved into an art less overtly political and more introspective; it had also shown dramatic growth--both in the number of its readers and its practitioners.

As a second Furious Flower Conference prepares to convene, Joanne Gabbin has assembled a remarkable selection of works by the Furious Flower participants. The forty-three poets cover three generations, ranging from such established voices as Michael Harper, Nikki Giovanni, and the late Gwendolyn Brooks, in whose honor the conference was organized, to a host of rising young writers who are reimagining America in the language of a hip-hop nation.

Furious Flower provides a fascinating collective portrait of African American poetry at the close of the twentieth century--as well as an indication of where it may be headed as we enter the twenty-first. The book includes biographies of the contributors and a dynamic collection of performance photographs by C. B. Claiborne featuring many of the Furious Flower participants as they appeared at the original 1994 conference.

Contributors

Gwendolyn Brooks * Samuel Allen * Adam David Miller * Pinkie Gordon Lane * Naomi Long Madgett * Dolores Kendrick * Garrett McDowell * Raymond R. Patterson * Alvin Aubert * Amiri Baraka * Sonia Sanchez * Lucille Clifton * Jayne Cortez * Eugene B. Redmond * Michael S. Harper * Askia M. Toure * Sterling D. Plumpp * Toi Derricotte * Everett Hoagland * Haki R. Madhubuti * Bernice Johnson Reagon * Nikki Giovanni * Jerry W. Ward Jr. * Lorenzo Thomas * Yusef Komunyakaa * Kalamu ya Salaam * Dorothy Marie Rice * Lamont B. Steptoe * Quo Vadis Gex-Breaux * E. Ethelbert Miller * Mona Lisa Saloy * Afaa Michael Weaver * Rita Dove * Opal Moore * Cornelius Eady * Carole B. Weatherford * Lenard D. Moore * Sharan Strange * Adisa Vera Beatty * Elizabeth Alexander * Jabari Asim * Joel Dias-Porter (DJ Renegade) * Thomas Sayers Ellis * John Keene * Natasha Trethewey * Major Jackson * Kevin Young * Garrett McDowell

Published in association with the Center for American Places

Sterling A. Brown's achievement and influence in the field of American literature and culture are unquestionably significant. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, German, and Russian and has been read in literary circles throughout the world. He is also one of the principal architects of black criticism. His critical essays and books are seminal works that give an insider's perspective of literature by and about blacks. Leopold Sedar Senghor, who became familiar with Brown's poetry and criticism in the 1920s and 1930s, called him "an original militant of Negritude, a precursor of our movement." Yet Joanne V. Gabbin's book, originally published in 1985, remains the only study of Brown's work and influence. Gabbin sketches Brown's life, drawing on personal interviews and viewing his achievements as a poet, critic, and cultural griot. She analyzes in depth the formal and thematic qualities of his poetry, revealing his subtle adaptation of song forms, especially the blues. To articulate the aesthetic principles Brown recognized in the writings of black authors, Gabbin explores his identification of the various elements that have come together to create American culture.