Title: The Black Nature Initiative: Camille T. Dungy at Berkeley
On Wednesday, February 19, at 6:30pm, the poet, anthologist, and essayist Camille Dungy will give a reading of her work in the Maude Fife Room of Wheeler Hall (Wheeler 315) on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. A reception will follow in the English Department Lounge. The reading is free and open to the public.
Camille Dungy’s visit to the Berkeley campus is the second event in the Black Nature Initiative, the series sponsored by the Robert Hass Chair in English, in which writers of color whose work addresses and celebrates the outdoors, read on campus and also meet public school students from underrepresented populations. The visit by essayist Eddy Harris in 2023 was the first event in the series. Harris visited campus and participated in YES/ Nature to Neighborhoods’ Camp Day at Miller Knox Regional Park in Richmond.
Camille Dungy will be in residence at U.C. Berkeley for three days in February. In addition to the reading on the 19th she will travel (on Thursday, the 20th) to Hayward, California and address the Creative Writing Club at the Leadership Public School Hayward. The faculty moderator for the club is Huey Collette (Berkeley, ’24) whose essay, “Counting the Distance From My View Underneath the Lights,” won the English Department’s 2024 Uchida Prize (awarded for “a substantial piece of prose, fiction or non-fiction” written by a Berkeley student). On Friday—the 21st—Mr. Collette, with the support of the Hayward administration, will also accompany club members to the Berkeley campus for a walk in the Eucalyptus Grove with Camille Dungy.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Soil was named book of the month by Hudson’s Booksellers and received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries. Dungy has also authored 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. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, and The 1619 Project, these volumes among others.
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, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (in both prose and poetry).