The Department of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has named award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy as its National Poetry Month speaker. Dungy will deliver a talk at 5:30 p.m. on April 8 in the Steinhart Room of the Lied Center for Performing Arts.
Dungy is an accomplished poet, authoring four poetry collections: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011)—which won the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize—Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), which earned the American Book Award in 2010, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006).
In addition to her poetry, Dungy is 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. Her 2023 collection, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster), was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. This work intertwines nature writing, environmental justice, and personal prose, urging readers to reflect on the connections between the African diaspora and the land they inhabit.
Dungy’s work as an editor has also been significant, particularly with her groundbreaking anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009). This collection was the first to focus on nature writing by African American poets, shedding light on a vital yet often overlooked part of literary tradition. She is also the poetry editor for Orion magazine.
Dungy’s impressive body of work has earned her numerous accolades, including fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Sustainable Arts Foundation, among others. In 2019, she received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, and more than 100 print and online journals.
Currently, Dungy serves as University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
Related topics: