PrairieLights – A reading with Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

The 2024 Paul Engle Prize winner and celebrated poet Camille T. Dungy will read from her newest poetry collection, America, a Love Story. Described by publisher Wesleyan University Press as a “powerful testament to living and loving as a Black woman and mother in today’s America, and her first book of poetry in almost a decade,” America, a Love Story is praised by Charley Burlock of Oprah Daily as an “electrifying new collection [that] arrives just on time, offering a version of patriotism capable of meeting the present moment and carrying us through to a brighter future,” while award-winning poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar says: “What a great fan I am of Camille Dungy’s work. I’ve spent so much time sitting at the foot of her language, just sort of learning what I can in slack-jawed wonder.”

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade (2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. 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, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry (weslpress.org).