Special Announcement: Patricia Smith’s What Breath Gives Back #19 and Danez Smith’s the fat one, with the switch were both finalists in the Best of the Net 2018 anthology. Check out these gold-star poems right here on The Fight & The Fiddle!
Summer 2019 |Nate Marshall | Vol. 3, Iss. 1
Welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle, a publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Each issue gives you a 360-degree view of a Black poet, including an interview, new poems, a critical essay, and a writing prompt inspired by our featured poet.
Nate Marshall grew up in poetry. From his leading role in the much-acclaimed documentary, Louder Than A Bomb, which chronicles the journey of four teams as they prepare to compete in a national poetry contest, to his work today as an award-winning writer, educator, and speaker, Marshall has indubitably demonstrated his dedication to the craft. He hails from the South Side of Chicago, a fact which is critical to both the content and structure of his poetry. His debut collection, Wild Hundreds, is an honest and loving portrait of the people and places he calls home, and captures in its dynamic and pitch perfect language the voices of Chicago. Marshall is also the editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and his next book, FINNA, is due out in 2020 from One World/Random House. He is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College.
- The Interview: Nate Marshall talks with editor Lauren K. Alleyne about the roles of community, violence, music, and Chicago in the making of his poems.
- Critical Review: In her piece, “Nate Marshall and the Power of the Word,” Dr. Emily Rutter explores Marshall’s use of “wild” to simultaneously portray an honest picture of life in the South Side of Chicago and to create a liberated space for the inhabitants of “the Hundreds.”
- Poems: Read “Nate Marshall is a white supremacist from Colorado or Nate Marshall is a poet from the South Side of Chicago or i love you Nate Marshall,” “another Nate Marshall origin story,” and “another Nate Marshall origin story,” by Nate Marshall.
- Writing Prompt: What’s in your name?
Photo by Erica Cavanagh
Cover Design by Megan Hinton