Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin is the founding executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. She was born in 1946 in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned a BS in English from Morgan State University, and an MA and PhD in English with a concentration in American literature and a special emphasis on Black literature from the University of Chicago. After roles at Roosevelt University, Chicago State, and Lincoln University, Dr. Gabbin came to James Madison University in 1985 as an associate professor of English. In 1986, she was appointed director of JMU’s Honors Program, a position she held for nineteen years, and in 1989, she was promoted to full professor.

In 1994, Dr. Gabbin organized the first academic conference on Black poetry, Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry, which honored her mentor and friend, poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She convened a second successful conference, Furious Flower II: The Black Poetic Tradition, in 2004 and established the Furious Flower Poetry Center at JMU the following year. The third conference, Furious Flower III: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, was held in 2014 and established the Furious Flower Poetry Conference tradition—a decennial, international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary gathering focused on Black poetry.

A scholar in her own right, Dr. Gabbin is widely published. Her monograph, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985), remains the definitive text on Brown’s work, and she has edited several groundbreaking anthologies, including the Furious Flower video anthology (1998), The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), and Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004). She has been recognized with numerous awards, among them JMU’s Provost Award for Excellence, the Virginia State Council of Higher Education’s Outstanding Faculty Award, and the College Language Association’s Creative Scholarship Award. In 2021, JMU honored Dr. Gabbin and her husband, Dr. Alexander Gabbin, for their contributions and decades of service, by renaming a campus building Gabbin Hall. 

Now professor emerita, having retired from JMU in 2022, Dr. Gabbin continues to contribute to the fields of Arts, Literature, and Culture. She is the owner/curator of Harrisonburg’s first fine arts gallery, 150 Franklin St Gallery. (est. 1994), where she houses a publicly accessible permanent exhibit, which includes the Furious Flower Quilt created by artist Malaika Favorite, and showcases the work of local, regional and national artists. She also serves as executive director of the Wintergreen Women’s Writers’ Collective, which she founded in 1987, and which incorporated in 2022 as a non-profit dedicated to serving Black women writers. 

Organizational Associations