Camille T.
Dungy is the author
of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (2017), Smith
Blue (2011), Suck on the Marrow (2010) and What
to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006). Her debut
collection of personal essays is called Guidebook to Relative Strangers (2017).
Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature
Poetry (2009); co-edited
the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (2009); and served as
associate editor for Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave
Canem’s First Decade (2006).
Dungy is currently
a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. Camille T. Dungy’s
honors include an American
Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award
nominations and a California Book Award silver medal. She 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. Her poems and essays
have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, nearly thirty other anthologies, and more than 100
print and online journals.
An award-winning African American poet debuts in prose with a stunningly graceful and honest exploration of race, motherhood, and history. As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as black females. With a poet’s eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child’s acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag. At the same time, her horizons are wide, as history shadows her steps everywhere she goes: from the San Francisco of settlers’ and investors’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana; from snow-white Maine to a festive, yet threatening, bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods.
With exceptional candor, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds—the multitudinous experiences of mothering, illness, and the ever-present embodiment of race—finding fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, far-seeing and intimate, her prose is an essential guide for a troubled land.
In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope. A readers companion will be availabe at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
The AJC Decatur Book Festival announces a new resource for writers and aspiring writers in the Atlanta area.
Click here to see a full list of past presenting authors at the AJC Decatur Book Festival.
The AJC Decatur Book Festival is the largest independent book festival in the country—but that's not all we do!
The organization behind the festival promotes a year-round literary community by hosting a series of fundraising and literary events.
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