Joanne V. Gabbin Papers

A professor of English at James Madison University, Joanne Gabbin earned her B.A. from Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland in 1967, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1970 and 1980, respectively. Gabbin taught at Roosevelt University, Chicago State University, and Lincoln University before she was hired at James Madison University in 1985 as a Commonwealth Visiting Professor. She became the director of the Honors Program (now the Honors College) in 1986, where she served for 19 years and founded many programs that define the Honors College today.

In 1994, she organized the first Furious Flower Poetry Conference, which she held at JMU and in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. The event was considered historic and likely the largest gathering of African American poets and literature scholars to that date. After a second successful conference a decade later, JMU chartered the Furious Flower Poetry Center in 2005, the nation’s first academic center devoted to Black poetry.

The author/editor of numerous books and founder of the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective, Gabbin’s contributions to the academic field of African American poetry have been acknowledged with awards and honors from such organizations as the HistoryMakers Archives, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the College Language Association and the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, among many others. Her publications include Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985), which was reissued in 1994 by the University Press of Virginia and the children’s book I Bet She Called Me Sugar Plum (2004). She also edited The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004), Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020), Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers (2009), and Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy (2009).