Biography
Camille T. Dungy was born and raised in the western United States (Colorado and California), though she has lived briefly in most other regions of the U.S. and has spent time on all but one continent and several countries. Dungy attributes some of the energy in her writing to both her delight in going new places and meeting new people and the good fortune of having a beautiful place to root down and call home. In much of her writing, Dungy considers history, landscape, culture, family, and desire. Her latest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden will be published by Simon and Schuster on May 2, 2023. You can pre-order the book now. Dungy is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press: 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton &Co: 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism.
Dungy’s interest in the intersections between literature, environmental action, history, and culture led her to edit Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press: 2009), the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and has served in several other editorial positions. Currently, she is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Dungy’s work has appeared in over 40 anthologies plus dozens of print and online venues in the U.S. and abroad. 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 further honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
