Lauren K. Alleyne

OBSIDIAN'S RADIANCE features four folios celebrating writing and arts of the African diaspora. Fiction folio "Radiant Youth: Stories of Light & Darkness," edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, explores and reveals what it means to be a child and how the experiences of our youth can impact and linger, even into our adulthood, sometimes for the rest of our days, complicating what it means to be a Black child living in a world that every day seems to want to remove you from it. The special section guest edited by Nancy D. Tolson with Wesley Jacques, "Visions & Words for Youth," invites questions, doubts, and challenges to the status quo with regard to how we read Black children. The annual Furious Flower Poetry Prize folio, judged by Kei Miller and introduced by Lauren K. Alleyne, celebrates the winner, honorable mention, and finalists, whose words, Gwendolyn Brooks might say, move with "wicked grace." Also included is an Editors' Folio, with new poetry and visual art.

"Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What's next for Black poetic expression?"--Back cover.