Black Poets & Their Fictions: A Reading & Conversation, Sponsored by Furious Flower Poetry Center

Thursday, March 5, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET

Ballroom II, Baltimore Convention Center, Level 400

In September 2024, Furious Flower celebrated its fourth decennial conference, “Furious Flower IV: The Worlds of Black Poetry,” which explored the expansiveness of expression within traditional and contemporary Black poetic practice. This panel extends that theme, bringing together three award-winning poets who have recently—and successfully—ventured into the world of fiction to share their experiences with the craft, complications, and rewards of engaging self, history, and language across genre.

Panelist bios: 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and other publications. Her debut novel, Promise (Random House), was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library best book of the year. She lives in New York City.




Canisia Lubrin is the author of five books, including Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, The World After Rain (2025), and Code Noir. Her honors include a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Griffin Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Lubrin has been twice a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is the coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA and poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Code Noir, her fiction debut, winner of the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, has fifty-nine drawings by celebrated visual artist Torkwase Dyson.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois, native. He is the author of the poetry collections Thief in the Interior and Mutiny. His debut novel, Ours, was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. He is a professor of creative writing at Rice University and founding faculty member of Randolph College.

Photo credit to Nicholas Nichols.







 

Lauren K. Alleyne serves as executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and a professor of English at James Madison University. She is author of two collections, Honeyfish and Difficult Fruit, and two chapbooks, Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel. She is also coeditor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry.

Photo Credit: Adriana Hammond