Over the next four and a half years, the Furious Flower Poetry Center will be developed at JMU and will be fully devoted to Black poetry.

Thanks to the Mellon Foundation, the center will archive, preserve and offer global access to a massive collection of Furious Flower poetry and spoken word performance videos that are in the current possession of the JMU Libraries Special Collections department.

The grant will be used to collaborate with JMU Libraries to focus on the Center’s web and scholarly publishing infrastructure, which includes “The Fight & The Fiddle,” Furious Flower’s trailblazing literary journal.

“The Mellon Foundation’s investment has helped us grow from a history of individual collaborations and friendships into a true institutional and organizational effort,” Dr. Bethany Nowviskie, Dean of Libraries, said in a statement. “This is hard, necessary work that goes beyond mere preservation and access.”

She continued: “It is based on equity and shared understanding, aimed at repairing historical imbalances and building a better future.”

Black Poetry

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