The Department of English has named award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy as the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's National Poetry Month speaker. Her talk is 5:30 p.m. April 8 in the Lied Center for Performing Arts' Steinhart Room.
Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017); Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize; Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010) winner of the American Book Award in 2010; and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006).
Dungy is also the author of two essay collections. Her debut, Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then toddler, intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child, but as black women.
Her essay collection, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) — 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.
Dungy is the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets. Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. Dungy serves as the poetry editor for Orion magazine.
Dungy is also the editor of several other anthologies, including From the Fishouse (Persea, 2009) and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006).
Dungy is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Diane Middlebrook Residency Fellowship of the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and other organizations. She was the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her poems and essays have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, nearly thirty other anthologies, and over one hundred print and online journals.
Dungy is currently University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
