Furious Flower Poetry Center Announces the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize Reading

The Furious Flower Poetry Prize for emerging writers is an annual competition running from December 15 through February 15 open to poets with no more than one published book. Each year, the winner and honorable mention are invited to read as a part of the Furious Flower Reading Series alongside the judge for that year's competition. This year, Tim Seibles will be joining our winner, Ariana Benson and honorable mention, Benin Lemus for the Center's first in-person poetry since the pandemic. The reading will be held in-person in the Highlands Room in Festival on JMU's campus and virtually on the Furious Flower Poetry Center Facebook page on April 20, 2022 at 5pm.

Tim Seibles, the judge for the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award, and One Turn Around The Sun (2017). His latest work of poetry, Voodoo Libretto, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2022. His poems have been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Ariana Benson, the winner of the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, was born in Norfolk, Virginia and is the recipient of both the 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize and the 2021 Porter House Review Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in such literary journals as Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, World Literature Today, Tinderbox, Auburn Avenue—where she serves as Nonfiction Editor—and elsewhere. Currently, she is serving as the 2022 Eliza Moore Fellow for Artistic Excellence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.

Benin Lemus, 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize honorable mention, is a writer and educator from Southern California that was raised in Portland, Oregon. She comes from a long line of writers and teachers. She earned her BA in English from Bennett College in North Carolina, an MFA in Film and Television Production from the University of Southern California, and a teaching credential in Secondary Education from Mount Saint Mary's University. Lemus's work can be found online and in print, most recently in A Gathering of Tribes Magazine, edited by Quincy Troupe, and Love Letters in Light, a poetry-based public art project curated by Leila Hamidi. A performer as well, she has performed at Pasadena LitFest, Center Theatre Group, and The World Stage Performance Gallery in historic Leimert Park. Her debut poetry collection, Dreaming in Mourning (World Stage Press) will be published in November 2022. As an active member of the Community Literature Initiative (CLI) and the Sims Library of Poetry, Lemus seeks to create social equity and justice through writing.

Please join us in-person or virtually April 20, 2022 at 5pm for our first reading in-person since the pandemic featuring these amazing poets. The reading will be held in the Highlands Room in Festival on JMU's campus and livestreamed to our Facebook page.