Black Women, Black Spring, the Furious Flower Broadside Gallery’s second exhibit, is dedicated to the many ways Black women experience, embrace, and embody nature. With the most vulnerable of us on the front ends of climate change, it is more important than ever to cultivate and protect our connection to the environment. In conversation with each other and with nature, the poems featured in the exhibit explore the power of listening, and the wisdom heard in the silence. Ultimately, Black Women, Black Spring, is about renewal and revitalization of the natural and the human world; the urgency with which we need to heed Black women’s voices in order to bridge the gap between these two places; and the efflorescent future that awaits us, promising beauty and balance.

CAMILLE T. DUNGY 

Award-winning poet, essayist, editor, and professor, Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade; two collections of non-fiction, including the forthcoming Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden; and editor of three anthologies, most pertinently, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Dungy’s deeply personal observations on nature, history, and race, expressed through stunning, visceral inhabitations of the world, are the binding threads of this exhibit. Her passion for celebrating Black nature is driven by the conviction that the separation of Black people from nature is a deliberate act of white supremacy and systemic disenfranchisement – one that disproportionately targets Black women. Dungy’s work is a call for us to liberate ourselves from the shackles of racialized and gendered ecologies.

LADAN OSMAN

Ladan Osman is a Somali-American poet, filmmaker, and essayist. Her work is inspired heavily by the dualism of her identity as Somali-American, and explores issues of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. “The Man Who Puts Dirt on His Head,” is a poem from Osman’s debut poetry collection, The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony. This autobiographical work, the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, explores themes of growing up, family, love, and community while relentlessly questioning conditioning to violence, divorce, and suffering. Osman also writes often about environmental disasters and difficult terrains, with reverence for the refugees who suffer them. Her work draws attention to the ways that intersections of identity affect our relationships with familiar and hostile landscapes. 

MARILYN NELSON

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of more than 20 books and chapbooks for adults and children, including her memoir of 50 poems, How I Discovered Poetry. In her 1978 poem, “My Grandfather Walks in the Woods,” a fantastical imagining of her familial past, Nelson embodies her philosophy about the poetic value of listening to everything, including the trees and the wind. Nelson considers the inextricable connection between the forests and the racialized violence they have witnessed throughout American history, while underscoring that racism should have no place in nature. Her reflections on childhood, innocence, and how a bit of wildness may be exactly what we need, guide us to an awareness of our interconnectedness with the planet and each other. 

DONIKA KELLY

Donika Kelly is author of two award-winning collections of poetry, The Renunciations and Bestiary. Kelly’s work looks inward, searching for the spark, the energy and experiences, that lives within all of us. In the poem, “Self-Portrait as a Body, a Sea,” the speaker is, “a body schooling, / a ball of fish, flashing.” Through dynamic natural imagery,  Kelly navigates the animal body and the ways it collides with the earth.