Fourth Decennial Furious Flower Poetry Conference Call for Proposals

deadline for submissions: 
January 31, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Furious Flower Poetry Center
contact email: 

Furious Flower IV Call for Proposals

    Words. Worlds. Abundance. 

The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University invites proposals for papers, panels, and performances that engage the global histories, aspirations, and forms of Black poetry. Since our groundbreaking 1994 gathering, the Center has convened a series of decade-defining conferences that explore and generate significant developments within Black poetic activity and scholarship.

With a canonical perspective and long historical memory, we have, in the intervening decades, curated, catalogued, and nurtured Black poetic activity in its plural manifestations as it surged and moved from the margins to eminence.

At our 2024 conference, “The Worlds of Black Poetry,” we seek to establish a space for transformative projects and conversations that center the worldwide, world-making energy of Black poetic expression, analyzing and celebrating its visionary abundance and planetary reach.

 

Major Conference Themes

 

— Black aliveness, joy, magnitude, abundance: How Black poetry continues to demonstrate resonant insistence on aliveness, intimacies, plenitude, and fullness. 

— Black Geographies: The Black outside, Black pastoral, Black wonders and wanderings. 

— Diasporic Solidarities: The long history of connectedness, exchanges, and influences across the African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latinx poetry worlds.

— Afrofuturism and Black futures: Imaginative discourses, strategies, and work oriented toward plural possible futures, alternative worlds, and elsewheres.

— Abolition and anti-carcerality: How poets are questioning the logics of prison and enclosures, as situated within the context of colonization and slavery and their afterlives. 

— Portals, movements, and migrations: How Black poets and poetry interrogate travel, journeys, border crossings, and movements. 

— The Black avant garde: Black poets who refuse easy categorization, moving between sounds and registers, forms and structures to architect poetic inventions. 

— Black queer poetics: The fullness and long history of queer poetics in the Black poetry firmament.

— Black forms: How Black poets invent, elevate, and give names to new poetic forms, or revisit and remake older forms, and in the process invent new publics.

— Black archival poetics: The explosion of Black poetic archival projects in these past decades, revisiting and transforming archives into alive testaments of history.

— Black epics: Investigations of contemporary Black epics in their manifold forms as work grounded in scale, ambition, erudition, ethical stamina, and long memory.

— Black digital worlds: How online journals, e-zines, podcasts, webcasts, micro platforms (Tumblr, etc.) became underground vaults and alive archives of Black poetry. 

— Translation: Black poets/scholars who are engaged in the sacred work of translating poems across languages and expanding the horizon of meaning and readership.

— Radical collectives, visionary organizing, and Black institutions: Black collectives and institutions that have had a radical impact on Black poetry and poetics. 

— Minor notes: Whose voice is missing in the Black poetic firmament? Black poetic activity outside the legibility of institutions.

— What to do with preeminence: Black poetry, without doubt, no longer resides in the margins. What is next? What to do with this eminence? Do we risk co-option, how do we resist normalizing the status quo of the world with this eminence?

 

Like the past three conferences, the 2024 conference will bring together a range of backgrounds, generations, and creative outlooks and voices across continents, hemispheres, and diasporas, while launching new scholarship, critical approaches, and performance strategies. We welcome 250-word proposals for papers, panels, and performances through January 31, 2024.