Alleyne, Lauren: Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014), and Honeyfish (2019); two chapbooks, Dawn in the Kaatskills (2008) and (Un)Becoming Gretel (2022). She is also the co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her work has been anthologized in Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade (2006) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She currently works at James Madison University as the Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center dedicated to Black poetry, and as a Professor in English. In 2022, she was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Alleyne was also nominated for the 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry.

Baraka, Amiri: Amiri Baraka, otherwise known as LeRoi Jones, was a writer of poetry, fiction, drama, essays and music criticism. He published his first work, a book of poems entitled Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His first major play, The Dutchman, opened in 1964 off-Broadway and earned an Obie Award for Best American Play. His publishing career spanned more than five decades. Baraka was known for his political and social criticism, which included themes of black liberation, racism, and inequality in the more than 50 books that he penned. In 1958, he founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press. In 1965, Baraka established the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, New York. Baraka earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Book Award in 1989 and later won an American Book Award for his nonfiction book, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (2010). He also received honors from various foundations, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also won the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Baraka taught at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and at SUNY Stony Brook, where he was an emeritus professor of Africana Studies. He died in 2014.

Brooks, Gwendolyn: Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 and passed in 2000. She was first published in the children’s magazine, American Childhood, and began contributing regularly to the “Lights and Shadows” poetry column of the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper. After graduating college, she worked as a typist to support her writing career. She then began to publish poetry books. In her lifetime, Brooks published more than 20 collections. These included: In the Mecca (1968), a finalist for the National Book Award; and Annie Allen (1949), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which made Brooks the first Black person to win the award. She published her first and only novel, Maud Martha, in 1953. Brooks also became the first Black writer to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976 and the first Black woman appointed to serve as the Library of Congress consultant in poetry in 1985 (now, known as the U.S. Poet Laureate). Her numerous honors include an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Poetry Society of America Shelley Memorial Award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. Additionally, Brooks earned more than fifty honorary degrees during her career. In 1995, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts–the highest award given to an artist or arts patron by the U.S. government.

Gabbin, Joanne V.: Joanne V. Gabbin is best known as the founding executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and is a professor emerita at James Madison University. She was born in 1946 in Baltimore, Maryland, and earned her doctorate in English from the University of Chicago. Gabbin came to Madison in 1985 after roles at Roosevelt University, Chicago State, and Lincoln University. She directed JMU’s Honors Program for nineteen years and was promoted to full professor of English in 1989. In 1994, Gabbin organized the first academic conference on Black poetry, entitled “Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry.” She convened a second conference in 2004 and established the Furious Flower Poetry Center at JMU the following year. Gabbin has published a variety of works, including Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985), The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), and Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004). She also founded the Wintergreen Women’s Writers’ Collective, and her numerous awards include the College Language Association’s Creative Scholarship Award and the Virginia State Council of Higher Education’s Outstanding Faculty Award. In 2021, Gabbin and her husband, Professor Alexander Gabbin, were honored at JMU by the naming of Gabbin Hall.

Jackson, Angela: Angela Jackson is a writer, poet, and playwright. Some of her publications include: Where I must Go (TriQuarterly Books, 2009); It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time (Northwestern University Press, 2015); All these Roads Be Luminous: Poems New and Selected (TriQuarterly Books, 1998); and Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (TriQuarterly Books, 1993). Her writing has been published in many journals and anthologies, as well, including Triquarterly, First World, Black World, Mississippi Valley Review, Black Review, Obsidian, Callaloo, Eyeball, A Revolution of Black Poets, Penguin Academics African American Literature, and many more. She was the Illinois Poet Laureate from 2020 to 2024. Jackson has been honored with many awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Award, Hoyt W. Fuller Award, the DuSable Museum Writers Seminar Poetry Prize, the ETA Gala Award, the Illinois Authors Literary Heritage Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Prize. She has additionally received fellowships from the Illinois Art Council for Creative Writing in Fiction and Playwriting, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sanchez, Sonia: Sonia Sanchez authored more than 20 books, including Homecoming (1969), a seminal text in the Black Arts Movement, Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), winner of the American Book Award, and Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She formed a writers’ workshop in Greenwich Village, which became the “Broadside Quartet,” a group of prominent Black Arts Movement artists including Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti and Amiri Baraka. She has lectured at more than 500 universities and was the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University. Sanchez has won numerous honors including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society’s Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, Robert Creeley Award, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the Jackson Prize, among others. Sanchez became the City of Philadelphia’s first Poet Laureate in 2001, and was selected as a Ford Freedom Scholar by the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.