Furious Flower Poetry Center Welcomes New Assistant Director

We are proud to announce L. Renée as the new Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, joining us this summer from Indiana University. An award-winning poet, nonfiction writer, and editor, L. Renée is an exciting addition to the Furious Flower team and the Department of English.  

L. Renée holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Indiana University, where she was Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow.

“I’m truly honored to be entrusted with this tremendous opportunity to expand the reach of the Furious Flower Poetry Center,” L. Renée said, “Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin has laid important groundwork to educate, celebrate, and preserve Black poetry for nearly four decades — persisting through times when Black poets often lacked recognition from the academy and broad support for their work, particularly work that interrogated socio-political, economic, and racial truths. I look forward to working with Lauren K. Alleyne, an accomplished poet and scholar in her own right, to take up this mantle and imagine new possibilities for the future of the center.”

L. Renée’s own research interests include Black Appalachian subjectivity in 19th and 20th Century Virginia and West Virginia, early 20th Century coal camps of Southern West Virginia, oral history collection as a mode of cultural memory, and familial archives. Her lyric prose and poems often incorporate archival research, photographs, and historic artifacts. Her publication credits include Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere.

“I hope that James Madison University community members, the broader Harrisonburg community, and those interested in poetry across the world, will find a home in our upcoming programming, events, and archive preservation efforts,” L. Renée continues. “Poetry has the keen ability to evoke feeling, to prompt questions, and to connect us beyond perceived differences. And somewhere between these three directional points, there is transformation. That is the work of all good poetry: We leave the page, or the room where it is read, different from how we entered. I hope to facilitate space for others to experience this kind of joy, tenderness, and revelation at Furious Flower and JMU.”