Soil: A Reading and Conversation About A Black Mother's Garden

1.5 LA CES HSW

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FEATURING

Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

(Recorded October 2025)

SESSION DESCRIPTION

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.

Presenter bio:

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Soil was named book of the month by Hudsons Booksellers, received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and was on the short list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Dungy has also written four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.