Author and Colorado State University professor Camille T. Dungy read from her newest book, “Soil: A Story of a Black Mother’s Garden,” on Monday, February 12, 2024, the Fort Collins Senior Center. The event was hosted by the Pollinator Habitat Group from the League of Women Voters of Larimer County.
The audience asked questions during the presentation.
“Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden” functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage readers to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade(Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
The volunteers of the League of Women Voters of Larimer County’s Pollinator Habitat Group work for climate justice by helping to create pollinator-friendly practices and habitats in Larimer County.
