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Announcing the 2022 Furious Flower Collegiate Summit: Poetry that Transports!

This year, all summit events will be held virtually on March 3-4, 2022. 

Open to undergraduate and graduate students across the country.

Our biennial Collegiate Summit is an exciting 3-day poetry workshop where participants get to learn from renowned poets and scholars. Each summit focuses on a theme central to the work of the featured poets. 

Events include:

Featured Programming

Workshop with Douglas Kearney: All Hooks: Repetition and Revision FTW 

So, I was listening to Beyoncé's "Formation," trying to figure out why it caught my ear the way it did; then I realized, the whole song is a series of hooks, choruses, layered throughout the mix. Repetition is groove, loop, hook, a serious tool in Black aesthetic trickbags. In this workshop, we will engage elements of repetition: chime, pun, and recursive constraints to compose poems that move even when they seem to stand still, work refrain till it don't stop, and catch you reading twice when you think you're only reading once.

Douglas Kearney has published seven collections, including the National Book Award-finalist Sho (Wave Books, 2021)”; the award-winning poetry collection Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016); libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016); and criticism, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015).) WIRE magazine calls Fodder, a live album featuring Kearney and frequent collaborator, Val-Inc., “Brilliant.” Douglas Kearney is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell and co-librettist of Sweet Land, the Music Critics of North America’s Best Opera of 2021. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, Kearney is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of Creative Writing/English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives in St. Paul with his family.  

Workshop with Amber McBride: Magick, Folklore & Myth in Black Poetry

Zora Neale Hurston said, “Folklore is the arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art.” This workshop investigates how myth, magick and folklore are widely present in Black poetry and how folklore can connect us to our pasts and through your work be passed on to the future.

Amber McBride teaches English literature at the University of Virginia and has a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts, The Rumpus and more. Me (Moth) is her debut novel and a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature. Amber loves poetry, music, movement and reading. She also spends too much time on TikTok. McBride practices Hoodoo and lives in Charlottesville, VA with her perfect dog, Shiloh.

Past Summits

2018: Poetry Without Boundaries