Winter 2024 | Erica Hunt | Vol. 7, Iss. 2

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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.

Erica Hunt is the author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, VERONICA: A Suite in X Parts and, most recently,  Jump the Clock. Hunt’s poets and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. Hunt’s essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, A-LINE, and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, she is co-editor of the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Women Radical Writing. Hunt has received fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, the Djerassi Foundation and Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy. In 2024, she received the Joseph Brodsky literature fellowship from The American Academy of Rome. She has taught at several institutions, and most recently served as Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing at Long Island University-Brooklyn, and Bonderman Visiting Associate Professor of Practice at Brown University.

• • Interview: Erica Hunt speaks with Lauren K. Alleyne about her community organizing history, her love of language and her belief in its power to make change.
  • Critical Essay: Dr. Meta DuEwa Jones pens a series of letters to Erica Hunt in her critical-creative piece, “Epistolary Encounters: Erica Hunt’s Avant-Garde Practices in Time”
  • Poems: Read an excerpt from Erica Hunt’s book-length poem-in progress, “Mood Librarian.” 
  • Writing Prompt: Who’s Speaking? Who’s listening? Write a letter to find out!

Cover Design by Robert Mott

Cover Photo: Joaquin Sosa

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.