“Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden” with Camille T. Dungy (November 9, 2024)

This program is free for Preserve Members. Members, please contact membership@bhwp.org for your code.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, CO. When she moved there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, the community held restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Definitive and singular, Soil 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.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy 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. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. 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 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.

Admission for non-members: $15