Camille Dungy will join KU for climate conversation series

LAWRENCE — Poet and author Camille Dungy will join the University of Kansas for a virtual conversation at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 20 as part of the ongoing series inspired by contributors to the book “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.”

Dungy, professor, gardener and author of the 2023 collection “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden,” will join Megan Kaminski, professor of English and environmental studies, and Imani Wadud, doctoral candidate in American studies, for the series, led by The Commons at KU. Register to attend on Zoom.

The “All We Can Save” series centers climate justice and draws from knowledge across and beyond fields of academic research. Contributors to the book “All We Can Save,” edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, share from their own experiences and work to inspire collective agency around the urgency of climate. This series highlights activists, scholars, thinkers and others whose life work generates and speaks to ideas for action, survival and nourishment.

“Camille Dungy’s ground-breaking book ‘Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden’ celebrates the connections and joy found through growing and tending to her garden and in caring for the natural world,” Kaminski said. “By tracing the roots of her own environmental stewardship through family, literary predecessors and community, she centers the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora to the land on which they live and invites us all to consider our ongoing relations with and within our own ecosystems.”

Dungy also is the author of four collections of poetry and the 2017 essay collection “Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History.” Dungy has also edited anthologies including “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.” A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she has received NEA fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

This series is led by The Commons with support from the Environmental Studies Program, the Hall Center for the Humanities, the KU departments of African & African-American Studies, English, Geography & Atmospheric Science, and Geology; the History of Black Writing; the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity; the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the University Honors Program.