Uncrowned Community Builders

Joanne V. Gabbin is the Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is author of Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, which was published in a new edition by the University Press of Virginia in 1994, The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004), and a childrenââ?¬â?¢s book, I Bet She Called Me Sugar Plum (2004).

As director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, Gabbin has organized two international conferences for the critical exploration of African American Poetry. The first, Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry held in 1994 with Gwendolyn Brooks, gathered 35 acclaimed poets to James Madison University in the first conference of its kind. The second, Furious Flower: Regenerating the Black Poetic Tradition brought together more than 50 nationally and internationally renowned poets in 2004.

A dedicated teacher and scholar, she has received forty awards for excellence in teaching, scholarship and leadership. Among them are the College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award for her book Sterling A. Brown (1986), the James Madison University Faculty Women's Caucus and Women's Resource Network Award for Scholarship (1988), the Outstanding Faculty Award, Virginia State Council of Higher Education (1993), the Provost Award for Excellence (2004), the JMU Distinguished Faculty Award (2005), induction in the Literary Hall of Fame at Chicago State University in 2005, and the 2007 Woman of Distinction Award.

Gabbin is also the founder and organizer of the Wintergreen Women Writers' Collective, which meets every year in Wintergreen, Virginia to promote scholarship in African American literature, serves on the board of the Cave Canem Foundation, and is a member or former board member of twenty-five professional and service organizations.

She received a B.A. in English from Morgan State College in 1967, an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1970, and the Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 1980.