Soil: A Reading and Conversation about A Black Mother’s Garden
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 7-8:30pm ET via Zoom
Every Thursday, the Conway School invites visiting speakers to present and engage in discussion with Conway’s graduate students. The audience of these conversations is usually limited to the current students to provide them with the opportunity to ask questions and connect with the speakers in a more intimate way. However, we are excited to open up one of these Thursday talks to the public! Join us for a Zoom presentation and Q&A with Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, which was the assigned summer reading for this year’s cohort.
Dungy is currently a University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University, and serves as the poetry editor for Orion magazine. You can view her complete bio here.
The book – which received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award – functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you 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.