JOANNE V. GABBIN

Producer

Biography

Joanne V. Gabbin is a professor of English at James Madison University where she directs the university's Honors Program. 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. Gabbin has published essays in Wild Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin and Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette
Bond Inge. Her articles have also appeared in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Zora Neale Hurston Forum, The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing, the Langston Hughes Journal, Callaloo, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and Black Books Bulletin.

A dedicated teacher and scholar, she has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching and scholarship. 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), and the Outstanding Faculty Award, Virginia State Council of Higher Education (1993). She is also the founder and organizer of the Wintergreen Women Writers' Collective, which meets every year in Wintergreen, Virginia. She also organized and directed the historic Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry Conference that brought 35 outstanding poets and critics to James Madison University in 1994. Out of that conference has come two books and her video series, Furious Flower: An Anthology of African American Poetry 1960-1995. Gabbin is currently the chair of the Board of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She also recently established the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.