Furious Flower — the name is Gwendolyn Brooks's image for the Black poet's brief, blazing season — began in 1994 as the first academic conference devoted to Black poetry, convened by Joanne V. Gabbin at James Madison University, and grew into the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the first academic center for Black poetry in the United States. The anthologies are its printed record: Brooks, Rita Dove, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Margaret Walker, and generations after them, in poems, critical essays, and interviews arguing over what Black poetry is and what it is for.
Author: edited by Joanne V. Gabbin (Vol. III co-edited with Lauren K. Alleyne) · Original publisher: University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville), 1999 (Vol. I, The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry)
