Land, Freedom and Friends

Land, Freedom and Friends, featuring Furious Flower Poetry Center poets and Diane Phoenix Neal, viola.

Celebrating the literary arts and melody, JMU’s Furious Flower Poetry Center joins forces with faculty violist Diane Phoenix-Neal in a concert affirming the collaborative kaleidoscope of music and poetry.

Lauren K. Alleyne (she/her) 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, and Ms., among several others. Alleyne, who hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, has been recognized with a US Artist Award nomination (2023), an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017) 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 Virgina, and the JMU Agency Star Award. 

Violist Diane Phoenix-Neal enjoys a vibrant teaching and performing career. She performs nationally and internationally as a collaborative chamber musician and as a soloist, and her performances have taken her to concert venues and music festivals throughout the world to four continents, including performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Banff Centre, Bowdoin International Music Festival and the festivals of Evian and Spoleto. In France, she served as both the principal solo violist of Orchestre de Picardie and as violist of Quatuor Joachim. Her sound is described as “rich and sumptuous,” and “priceless as it was memorable” (Cultural Voice of North Carolina), and she is a longstanding principal performer and soloist with the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival as well as a collaborative performing artist and faculty member with the Eastern Music Festival. 

Originally from North Carolina, she received her training from the Juilliard School as a student of William Lincer and the Juilliard Quartet, from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, after a ten-year career as a performer and teacher in Portugal and France. An active member of the American Viola Society, she is passionate about teaching and exploring the broad kaleidoscope of viola repertoire to perform and introduce to her students.  

A champion of new music for viola and of music by underrepresented composers, her recitals and commissioning projects featuring contemporary music for viola have been featured at James Madison University’s Contemporary Music Festivals, the Northwestern University New Music Conference, the University of Wyoming, International Viola Congresses in Australia (IVC 35) and Poland (IVC 41 in and IVC 43), in the Music by Women Festival and the 50th Anniversary American Viola Society Festival. Her recent CD When the Spirit Sings, in collaboration with the chamber group Musica Harmonia, features the chamber music of Gwyneth Walker and explores American spiritual melodies and themes.