SAW PHOTOG


Opening Reception for 405

The 405 opening reception will take place on Tuesday, September 17, 2024 from 7pm-9pm in celebration of the fourth convening of the Furious Flower Poetry Conference at the 150 Franklin Street Gallery in Harrisonburg, VA—owned by Furious Flower founder Dr. Joanne Gabbin. The show will remain on view until October 31, 2024.

The evening will feature a gallery talk by Shannon Woodloe and poetry readings from Chet’la Sebree, DaMaris Hill, and Lauren Alleyne.

This event is supported by Sigma Gamma Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and The George Washington University.

Featured Artists' Bios

Shannon Woodloe is a storyteller who weaves narratives through her striking visual images rather than words. She crafts her photographic tales from her unique experiences and the inspirations drawn from admired writers. Woodloe's dedication to narrative photography stems from her mother, who "always had a camera" and captured the family's history through evocative, inspiring photographs spanning generations.

Based in Wilmington, DE, Woodloe is a self-taught photographer and teaching artist. A 2019 Delaware Division of Arts Emerging Artist fellow, she has been photographing professionally for seven years. She currently serves as the Manager of Marketing and Digital Storytelling for the Delaware Art Museum; and as a Teaching Artist and Program Coordinator for the Delaware Institute for Art in Education.


Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry nominee. She has received fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Hawthornden Foundation, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo, where she received the 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Residency for Collaborative Teams. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Yale ReviewThe Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and Colorado Review, among others.  

Currently, she is an assistant professor at George Washington University and visiting faculty in the Low-Residency MFA program at Randolph College.


Lauren K. Alleyne serves as Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and a Professor of English. She is author of two collections Honeyfish (2019), Difficult Fruit (2014), two chapbooks Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel, and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies internationally, including venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Caribbean Writer, and Ms., among many others. Alleyne, who hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, has been recognized with the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017), an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020), and has been shortlisted for the BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry (2020). In 2022, Alleyne was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar.  Her most recent book, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, is deemed “urgent” and “luminous” in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review. Hill’s first poetry collection, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, is a powerful narrative-in-verse that bears witness to Black women burdened by incarceration. It was an Amazon #1 Best Seller in African American Poetry, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title, and 2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Hill’s other books include The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, and \Vi--bəl\   \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures).  Her digital work, “Shut Up In My Bones”, is a twenty-first century poem that uses remix/pastiche/intertextuality to honor a specific cultural past, while working to construct visions of a better future. 

Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. She is a 2024-2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Hill is a Professor of Creative Writing, English, and African American Studies at the University of Kentucky.


Using Format