Summer 2025 | Evie Shockley | Vol. 9, Iss. 1
Lauren K. Alleyne, Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center
John Hodges, Video Producer | Riley M. Hollars, Graduate Editorial Assistant
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.
Evie Shockley’s poetry collections include suddenly we, and the Hurston/Wright Award-winning books the new black and semiautomatic, the latter of which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her scholarly work has been published in her book Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, and in such journals and volumes as The Black Scholar, New Literary History, The New Emily Dickinson Studies, and The Cambridge Companion to American Modernist Poetry. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, ACLS, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Cave Canem, among other honors. Shockley serves as Editor for Poetry at Contemporary Literature and is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
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- Interview: Evie Shockley speaks with Executive Director, Lauren K. Alleyne, about her practice, her most transformative encounters with poetry, and her relationship to her writing and that of others.
- Critical Essay: Dr. Diamond Forde considers the relationships between self (“me”) and community (“we”) in Evie Shockley’s fourth poetry collection, suddenly we.
- Poems: Read “from the infinite alphabet of afroblues,” “décima on the fabric of time,” and “composition.”
- Writing Prompt: Write a multi-throated poem–sing the “we”!
Read the transcription here
Cover Design by Robert Mott
Cover Photo: Joaquin Sosa
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.