Furious Flower Poetry Center to Host Annual Poetry Prize Reading for 2025
September 8th, 2025 (Harrisonburg, VA) — The Furious Flower Poetry Center is proud to announce Martins Deep as the 2025 Furious Flower Poetry Prize Winner. This year’s winner was selected by distinguished judge and acclaimed poet, aracelis girmay.
The event will take place on Thursday, September 18th, 2025, at 5 PM EST in Taylor 404, located at The Union, 170 Bluestone Drive, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807. The evening will include readings by the winner, Martins Deep; the judge, aracelis girmay; and the honorable mention, Ian-Khara Ellasante. A book signing with aracelis will follow, featuring her forthcoming collection Green of All Heads (BOA Editions), which will be published on September 16th, 2025. Light refreshments will be provided. This gathering is free and open to the public and welcomes poetry lovers, students, educators, and community members to meet the readers and listen to their work. Books by aracelis girmay will be available for purchase at the event.
Bios for this event’s featured poets:
Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet, photographer, digital artist, and a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. His manuscript, “Sighs in Translation”, achieved semifinalist status for the ’23 Sillerman Prize. His creative works have graced—or are forthcoming—in publications including Magma Poetry, Strange Horizons, Heartlines Spec, Fiyah, Lolwe, and Tahoma Literary Review. Martins Deep is this year’s 2025 Furious Flower Poetry Prize Winner.
aracelis girmay is the author of three books of poems for which she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her most recent work is the chapbook and was a flower, made in collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica. Her newest full-length collection will be out with BOA Editions in the fall. Other recent work has been published in Astra, The Paris Review online, and e-flux. girmay curated How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton and served as the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket, 2023). She is currently completing her last year in her editor-at-large role for the Blessing the Boats Selections. girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.
Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta, Writing the Land: Maine, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Ian-Khara is a 2023 Cave Canem Fellow and has received the New Millennium Award for Poetry and the Ashley Bryan Fellowship. Their critical writing, including the essay "Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation,” has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Families in Society. Ian-Khara is a Point Foundation Scholar and an alum of the University of Memphis (BA) and the University of Arizona (MA and PhD). Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they are an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College.
Event Details:
What: Furious Flower Poetry Prize Reading
When: Thursday, September 18th, 2025 at 5PM EST
Where: Taylor 404, The Union, 170 Bluestone Drive, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
Parking: Off-campus guests of James Madison University’s Campus have permission to park in the Grace Street Parking Deck
For more information, please contact Jazmin Witherspoon at l6xsxd@jmu.edu or visit https://www.jmu.edu/furiousflower/index.shtml
