The Furious Flower Poetry Center, in partnership with the Furious Flower Advisory Board, hosted more than 20 scholars and poets at James Madison University in June to create an open-access curriculum for incorporating Black poetry into classrooms of all ages and levels. These pedagogical materials will be distributed to educators nationwide for free to encourage further engagement with Black poetry.   

Participants working to create the open-access resource titled, The Furious Flower Syllabus Project: Opening the World of Black Poetry, were placed into groups based on the academic level for which the materials were intended, such as high school, undergraduate, graduate, and community education. In these groups, they collaborated on the creation of educational materials like unit plans, exercises, course projects, and more. The educators used Furious Flower resources such as the center’s archive, housed in JMU Special Collections and available online, as well as Furious Flower’s published anthologies of poetry. The education materials will be coalesced, edited, and published as an open-access digital text in PressBooks with the support and assistance of JMU Libraries.