Spring 2026 | Krista Franklin | Vol. 9, Iss. 4
Lauren K. Alleyne, Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center
JohnTyler Richards, Video Production Supervisor | Riley M. Hollars, Graduate Editorial Assistant
Alli Donnelly and Stephen Lunde, Student Videographers
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.
Krista Franklin is a poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Solo(s), Too Much Midnight, the artist book Under the Knife, and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body. She is a Cave Canem fellow, a recipient of the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her written and visual work is also celebrated in the national collections of DePaul Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection + Archive. She has exhibited her visual art at Western Exhibitions, Poetry Foundation, Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. Additionally, her work has been used as set dressing for various national television programs in the United States. Franklin’s work has been published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and many more anthologies and art books.
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- Interview: Krista Franklin speaks with Lauren K. Alleyne about collage as a poetic practice, the (sur)reality of the body, and the impact of place.
- Critical Essay: Nikema Bell examines Krista Franklin’s centering of the Black body as archive and muse in her essay “The Alchemy of Remembrance: The Body as Archive in Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight.“
- Poems: Read “Mourner’s Corner,” “High Priestess,” “On Measurement & Invisibility,” and “This is not your poem” by Krista Franklin
- Writing Prompt: Break language apart and reassemble it into something new!
Read the transcription here
Cover Design by Robert Mott
Cover Photo: Bob Adamek
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.