Tara Betts
Personal Information
Description
Tara Betts has taught at several Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois-Chicago, and Rutgers University, as well as at Stateville Prison via Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. Tara served as the Inaugural Poet for The People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago. Tara is also Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side.-Loyola University
Books
Furious Flower
"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.