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Furious Flower
Seeding the Future of African American Poetry

By Joanne V. Gabbin, Edited by Lauren K. Alleyne, Foreword by Rita Dove

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. Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What’s next for Black poetic expression?

Here, Now
Essays

Michelle Suzanne Mirsky

“Hilarious and painfully real, this writing doesn’t just break the heart, it reveals it.”

—Jenny Slate

Traveling Freely
Essays

Roberto Carlos Garcia

“Reading Traveling Freely, is exactly like the joy of reading James Baldwin for the very first time…Like Baldwin, Roberto Carlos Garcia does this labor of love with the elegance of a poet that can both inform and transform us.”

—Tanya Kateri Hernandez, author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality

Altars of Spine and Fraction
Poems

Nicholas Molbert

“Like saltwater mixing with the rivers of the gulf, Nicholas Molbert’s Altars of Spine and Fraction blends the myriad complexities of the American South with grace and beauty. These coming-of-age poems mark the borders of innocence and experience in powerful and memorable ways. Each poem arcs into the water, and I am consistently amazed at what Molbert’s poems manage to pull ashore.”

—Adam Clay, author of Circle Back: Poems

Find Me When You’re Ready
Poems

Perry Janes

“Janes displays an unabashed earnestness that suggests an authentic need to say what cannot be easily told. He is at the core a storyteller, and as any good storyteller knows, memory has its demands. Read this and be inspired by Janes’s unsparing commitment to self-reclamation and hard-won joy.”

—Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World