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Flowerings Highlights 2025

Thanks to generous funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Flowerings grant continued to meet its goals in 2025 through recruitment and staff development, extensive work on the Furious Flower collections, instructional and pedagogical engagement, programming and events, scholarship, and publicity.

Recruitment and Staff Development

Furious Flower’s Executive Director, Lauren K. Alleyne, and Gbenga Adesina, Furious Flower Fellow in Black Global and Diasporic Poetry were thrilled to welcome the following team members:

  • Nikema Bell, MA Furious Flower Special Projects Coordinator
  • Tara Dolan, MNA Office & Communications Coordinator 
  • Jazmin Witherspoon, MFA Program and Operations Manager
  • Riley Hollars, Graduate Editorial and Event Assistant

Thanks to support from this grant, staff travelled to events and conferences such as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Best Practices Exchange, Calabash Literary Festival, Digital Library Forum, and the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting.

Furious Flower Collections

In 2025, JMU Libraries digital curation team members made the recordings from the 2024 Furious Flower conference available in our AV repository, Aviary. Although this particular collection of recordings are only available on JMU’s campus, users can learn about the collection through ArchivesSpace and view previous conferences in Aviary.

ArchivesSpace screenshot.
Screenshot of the ArchivesSpace record for the Black Universe I: Featured Poets Reading from the 2024 Furious Flower Poetry Center Conference

During the summer, we hired a vendor to reformat the remaining footage from the 2004 Furious Flower Conference. This footage filled in the gaps from the conference materials that had previously been digitized. The workflows and procedures the digital curation team established and refined for the 1994 and 2024 conference materials allowed team members to quickly ingest the 2004 conference materials into our preservation system (Preservica) when they arrived from the vendor.

The vendor also provided transcripts for the reformatted recordings, adding an additional layer to the description process. At the end of 2025, team members began reviewing the footage and transcriptions, with the goal of providing full access to these recordings by the end of the Spring 2026 semester.

Using the workflows and experience gained from working with the FFPC Conference Recordings, we have begun to expand the collections available in our AV Repository, Aviary, to non-Flowerings related materials. Currently, users can access the Immigrant Narrative Project Oral Histories, with plans to migrate materials related to Celebrating Simms materials and recordings from the JMU School of Music in early 2026.

As we expanded our collections and explored additional functionality with our novel system integrations, we continued our work with AVP (the vendor of Aviary) to resolve technical issues as they arose. By fall of 2025, all known, outstanding issues were resolved, allowing seamless communication between our AV repository (Aviary), preservation system (Preservica), and archives information management system (ArchivesSpace). JMU Libraries has formally announced Aviary as a new resource for campus use.

Carrier Library Renovation and Construction

The Carrier Library renovation and construction project includes a dedicated space for the Furious Flower Poetry Center. The Flowerings Framework funded by our planning grant from the Mellon Foundation has continued to support our partnership during meetings and site visits to prepare for move-in in Fall 2026!

Large open space with a meeting table and view of the mountains.
Furious Flower Poetry Center’s office suite in Carrier Library. Photo credit: Andrew J. Strack / JMU Libraries
Entrance to office suite with reception desk and meeting table.
Reception desk in Furious Flower’s new office suite. Photo credit: Andrew J. Strack / JMU Libraries

Instructional and Pedagogical Engagement

Furious Flower Poetry Center continues to build on its programmatic mission to cultivate an appreciation for poetry among students via collaboration with JMU’s Center for Multicultural Student Services, African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center, and the Department of English.

Furious Flower celebrated April 2025’s National Poetry Month by hosting a series of campus and community workshops:

  • Poetry Extravaganza! A student workshop led by Dr. Gbenga Adesina
  • Poet-TREE: Nature Writing Poetry Workshop in Collaboration with the EJC Arboretum led by Dr. Gbenga Adesina
  • A Poetry Writing Workshop: A community workshop for people of all ages in Collaboration with Asbury United Methodist Church

Programming and Events

Furious Flower Poetry Center awarded its 2025 Poetry Prize to Martins Deep and runner up Ian-Khara Ellasante! The prize winner’s and judge aracelis girmay were invited to a special 2025 Poetry Prize reading event at JMU on September 18th, 2025. Congratulations to our winners!

Furious Flower Reading Series was pleased to host the following poets for live reading events and workshops in 2025:

Furious Flower’s Broadside Gallery hosted a number of engaging exhibits in 2025 as part of The Art’s Council of the Valley’s First Friday: Downtown Artwalk monthly program. 

  • Sea Changes (February – April) – Curated by Bethany Nowviskie and Kimberly Gillette, JMU Libraries
  • Of Contagions, Confusions, and Cleansing (April – July) – Curated by Adérónké A. Adésànyà, JMU Professor SADAH
  • Language Lessons, Lineage (September – October) – Curated by Richard Morrell, JMU Chauffer/Retired Secondary Educator
  • History Repeating Repeating (November – January) – Curated by Jazmin Witherspoon, Program and Operations Manager, Furious Flower Poetry Center

Publications, Press, and Appearances

Furious Flower Poetry Center

The Fight & The Fiddle, the online literary publication of Furious Flower Poetry Center continued its history of scholarly review and literary critiquein 2025 with quarterly issues featuring:

World of Black Poetry Podcast – Furious Flower Poetry Center’s podcast series was nominated for Best Limited Series, Black Podcast Awards 2025. Furious Flower IV: The World of Black Poetry is a series featuring the voices, poems, and stories of the 10 poets honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards at Furious Flower’s Conference in 2024. 

Gbenga Adesina, Furious Flower Fellow in Black Global and Diasporic Poetry, published his groundbreaking debut book of poems Death Does Not End at the Sea, University of Nebraska Press on September 1st, 2025, with a special Book Launch event hosted at Furious Flower Poetry Center. The collection is Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry and the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection respectively. Our largest congratulations to Gbenga on this phenomenal achievement and continued success!

Furious Flower Poetry Center celebrated the launch of its “About Our Founder” page, dedicated to Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin, Founding Executive Director of Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor Emeritus at JMU.  This site serves as the premier online academic resource regarding Dr. Joanne Gabbin’s life and legacy as it relates to poetry and the Center. The site contains an extensive resource of articles and books written by and about Dr. Gabbin, as well as video interviews and a timeline of her life. This digital resource is supplemented by JMU Library’s special collections, where Dr. Gabbin has donated all her papers, manuscripts, communications, and more. 

Furious Flower is now featured on the Roots Run Deep Harrisonburg Tour.

Libraries

Cairdeas, B. & Carpenter, L. (2025, July 29). Unraveling the Many-to-One Dilemma in Archival Arrangement. Descriptive Notes. https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/unraveling-the-many-to-one-dilemma-in-archival-arrangement/

Lane, M.; Black, D.; Cairdeas, B.; & Carpenter, L. (2025) Digital Curation: Working Toward Shared Governance [Conference presentation]. 2025 Best Practices Exchange, Columbia, SC. Layne and David gave a version of this presentation to JMU Libraries, August 2025

Press Releases

Questions?

Contact Galen Talis, project coordinator (talisgj@jmu.edu)

Mellon Award #: 2012-09851