Furious Flower Grows in Virginia
English professor at James Madison University (JMU), organized a conference to celebrate Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks and African American poetics. Hundreds of people came out to hear Brooks and more than thirty writers and scholars, including Amiri Baraka, Toi Derricotte, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Sonia Sanchez, read and discuss poetry. It was a landmark event for the community, “the seeding place of what is happening today in Black poetry,” says poet
