Author: Camille Dungy

Read Dr. Desmond Murray’s feature on “The Works of Camille T. Dungy” here!

“I’ve been a fan of Camille Dungy’s poetry and nonfiction for years. I fan-girl so hard and slid into her dm’s.

So when Camille answered my email and agreed to be interviewed, I was stunned.

She has been writing America, A Love Story for years, but in this current political and economic moment, it feels like she wrote it yesterday.

As Veronica Corpuz of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes, Camille ‘explores with unflinching honesty the nuances of love—familial, maternal, romantic, love of nature, and an abiding love for Black culture and people.’

This book will poke tiny holes in everything you love and believe.”

Watch the conversation here.
Check out the rest of the eight interviews here.

“In celebration of National Poetry Month, we’re proud to highlight a curated selection of new titles from our sponsors, partners, and advertisers. Their support makes it possible for us to expand the reach of poetry across the United States. We hope you’ll take a moment to explore these books and the remarkable writers behind them.”

Check out the list here!

“It took Camille T. Dungy over a decade to write the poems in America, A Love Story and this collection aptly captures what fleeting time can hold, and the weight of its history. With precision and candor, Dungy examines Black womanhood and motherhood in America and turns a questioning gaze at love, survival, and beauty. On these pages, there is no looking away from despair and the terror that plagues one’s life. “No story I write could ignore the perils that endanger my loves, threaten to kill them,” she writes. Dungy’s language is unrestrained and unapologetic, and the poems surprise, unsettle, and awaken you.  

Dungy and I connected over email. We talked about motherhood, writing in the face of fear, putting the emotion of anger to good use, and insisting on beauty and love.”

Read the interview here.

“IN CELEBRATION OF the publications of their newest collections America, A Love Story and The Negroes Send Their Love, we invited Orion‘s former poetry editor Camille T. Dungy and Orion contributor Sean Hill to meet up for a conversation on time, craft, communal memory, paying attention to the more-than-human world, and the complications of race in America.”

Read the full conversation here.

Listen to the podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Read highlights from the episode here.

“In the sublime first poem in Dungy’s (Soil, 2023) marvelous new collection, the speaker’s grandmother and the rolling hills of America are juxtaposed. “You have witnessed, America, how pleasant hillsides can quickly catch fire. My grandmother could be like that. But she protected me, too.” What follows is a stunning exploration of motherhood, the natural world, nostalgia, and life as a Black woman in America, set within the complex history and landscape of a country where “there is not a place I can wander inside you and not feel a little afraid.” Whether lamenting the loss of a childhood safe space, noting the threats of the modern world, elegantly illustrating banal yet terrifying dangers (“Poem revised in a 12th-floor hotel room after noticing a man in the building across the street was holding binoculars”), or presenting a snapshot of a Midwest winter (“The gray seeped into us and we were hard on each other”), Dungy offers vivid language and subtle yet powerful imagery. With transportive clarity—“Pittsburgh, late April. Cold as the setting sun burnished mirrored buildings bronze”—Dungy brings the reader fully into each moment.” — Allison Escoto

See the full list here!

Read the review here.

View the full list here.

“The passionate latest collection from Dungy (Trophic Cascade) delivers an unsettled ode to her native country that weaves together places the poet has inhabited and people she has known.”

Read the full review here!