CALL FOR PAPERS
2024 Furious Flower Poetry Conference
Furious Flower: Celebrating The Worlds of Black Poetry
September 18-21, 2024
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
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.
—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.
PANELS (75-90 minutes)
— Submit a 250-word panel description with a clearly marked title. Your proposal should provide historical/canonical context and articulate how the panel discussion contributes in an innovative way to discourses of Black Poetic activity.
— The panel description must include the names of all the panelists and indicate whether each panelist has confirmed participation if accepted. Panels should have 3-4 participants, one of whom should be identified as the moderator.
— Panels may be critical, creative or hybrid. Groups of performers should submit in the “Performance” category.
— Any clear and legible font is welcome, preferably 12pt, Times New Roman.
— You are welcome to submit a total of up to three proposals across all categories; however, you may not submit the same proposal in more than one category. Please note that participants cannot be on more than two accepted proposals across all categories.
— We are interested in multiplicity of identities, interests, gazes, voices, and angles, especially those marginalized in mainstream and institutional settings, and we welcome proposals that explore and center these.
TIMELINE:
- Proposal Submission Deadline: Jan. 31, 2024
- Notice of Proposal Acceptance: Mar. 15, 2024
- Confirmation of Acceptance & Registration: Mar. 31, 2024
ELIGIBILITY:
— We welcome proposals from poets, critics, scholars, and performance artists who center Black poetic activity in their work and praxis.
— Furious Flower welcomes proposals from all over the world. We will provide official acceptance letters to international participants to assist with visa considerations; however, participants are fully responsible for all their travel arrangements, including visa processing, registration, room and board.
— We encourage submissions from marginalized voices and people from underserved communities.
You are invited to submit a 250-word abstract that:
- Has a clear title
- Details the paper’s main arguments and support
- Provides relevant historical/canonical context, and intersections of approaches.
- — We welcome proposals from poets, critics, scholars, and performance artists who center Black poetic activity in their work and praxis.
— Any clear and legible font is welcome, preferably 12pt, Times New Roman.
— You are welcome to submit a total of up to three proposals across all categories; however, you may not submit the same proposal in more than one category. Please note that participants cannot be on more than two accepted proposals across all categories.
— We are interested in multiplicity of identities, interests, gazes, voices, and angles, especially those marginalized in mainstream and institutional settings, and we welcome proposals that explore and center these.
— Accepted papers will be grouped into thematically aligned panels.
TIMELINE:
- Proposal Submission Deadline: Jan. 31, 2024
- Notice of Proposal Acceptance: Mar. 15, 2024
- Confirmation of Acceptance & Registration: Mar. 31, 2024
ELIGIBILITY:
— We welcome proposals from poets, critics, scholars, and performance artists who center Black poetic activity in their work and praxis.
— Furious Flower welcomes proposals from all over the world. We will provide official acceptance letters to international participants to assist with visa considerations; however, participants are fully responsible for all their travel arrangements, including visa processing, registration, room and board.
— We encourage submissions from marginalized voices and people from underserved communities.
PERFORMANCES — Maximum 60 minutes
— Submit a 250-word performance description with a clearly marked title. Your proposal should provide historical/canonical context and articulate how the performance engages discourses of Black Poetic activity in innovative ways.
— Any clear and legible font is welcome, preferably 12pt, Times New Roman.
— We welcome group or solo performance proposals. Solo proposals will be grouped into thematically aligned groups according to our programming needs.
— (Optional) Presenters are welcome to send in audio or video recordings of their performances to give us a clearer idea of their work and performance strategies.
— You are welcome to submit a total of up to three proposals across all categories. You may not submit the same proposal in more than one category. Please note, participants cannot be on more than two accepted proposals across all categories.
— We are interested in multiplicity of identities, interests, gazes, voices, and angles, especially those marginalized in mainstream and institutional settings, and we welcome proposals that explore and center these.
TIMELINE:
- Proposal Submission Deadline: Jan. 31, 2024
- Notice of Proposal Acceptance: Mar. 15, 2024
- Confirmation of Acceptance & Registration: Mar. 31, 2024
ELIGIBILITY:
— We welcome proposals from poets, critics, scholars, and performance artists who center Black poetic activity in their work and praxis.
— Furious Flower welcomes proposals from all over the world. We will provide official acceptance letters to international participants to assist with visa considerations; however, participants are fully responsible for all their travel arrangements, including visa processing, registration, room and board.
— We encourage submissions from marginalized voices and people from underserved communities.
Review and Selection Criteria:
The proposals will be reviewed by a panel of poets, scholars, and performance artists who will select work based on:
— Originality of idea
— Excellent historical and canonical contextualization
— Freshness of methodology and intersections of approaches
— Thematic alignment and programming needs
— Clear demonstration of ability to execute and deliver on the promise and premise of the proposals.