Joanne V. Gabbin, Ph.D.

Joanne V. Gabbin is the Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author or editor of Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985), The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004), a children's book, I Bet She Called Me Sugar Plum (2004), and Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy (2009).  As director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, Gabbin has organized two international conferences for the critical exploration of African American Poetry.

Hilary Holladay, Ph.D.

Hilary Holladay is a Senior Program Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities while on leave from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where she is a professor of English and the director of the Kerouac Center for American Studies.   Dr. Holladay will collaborate with Dr. Gabbin to establish the intellectual and academic content and will develop the curriculum of the seminar. Dr. Holladay will collaborate with seminar faculty to ensure that the intellectual goals of the seminar are met. Additionally, as a leading Clifton scholar, Dr. Holladay will be the lead teacher.

Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney is a poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky whose writing and career trajectory have been deeply influenced by Lucille Clifton. Finney will discuss geographical evolutionary theory in relationship to Clifton's poetry and prose and will explore the issues of myth and resistance as they connect Virginia with the Dahomey region of Clifton's ancestors.

Akasha Gloria Hull, Ph.D.

Akasha Gloria Hull is a professor emerita at  the University of California-Santa Cruz. She has written and lectured widely on the supernatural and spiritual themes in Clifton's poetry and has interviewed Clifton intensively on this themes. She will explore spirituality and the supernatural in the poetry of Lucille Clifton with participants and with the poet.

Keith Leonard, Ph.D.

Keith Leonard, a professor of literature at American University, will discuss traditional poetic artistry as a mode of political agency and explore the protest element in the poetry of Lucille Clifton. Dr. Leonard will apply the theory that he developed in Fettered Genius (2005) to Clifton's poetry and show how she inserted racial experience, racial protest, and African American culture into public discourse by making them valid features of her poetic expression.

Edward Scott, Ph.D.

Edward Scott is an associate professor of philosophy and assistant dean of the college at Mary Baldwin College. His research focus includes aesthetics, ethics, the philosophy of religion and African American thought. He has lectured widely on jazz, African American poetics, and the narrative self. He is currently working on a novel, The Gathering of Blessings. He also contributed "Bardic Memory and Witness in the Poetry of Samuel Allen" to The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1994).

Cheryl Wall, Ph.D.

Cheryl Wall will lead participants in an exploration of the folk and vernacular tradition in Lucille Clifton's poetry. Dr. Wall is a professor of literature at Rutgers University. She will address connections between identity and memory and will also show how Clifton creates her multitudinous self in Generations: A Memoir (1976).