Camille T. Dungy, camilledungy.com, is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Soil was named book of the month by Hudsons Booksellers, received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and was on the short list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Dungy has also written 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. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. 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 honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
“Brilliant and beautiful” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Manuscript critiques are an important part of our conference, providing a way for you, the writer, to discuss your work one-on-one with experienced writers, editors, and agents. Read through our guidelines on the critiques and be aware of limited critique availability with individual faculty.
We are a resident organization of a vibrant arts facility with multiple meeting and classroom spaces as well as a full-sized theater. The Center is within walking distance of the town’s many amenities, eateries, and hotels, including our conference hotel, The Anvil Hotel.
The Anvil Hotel serves as basecamp for the conference. The Anvil is just three block from The Center for the Arts with the town square in between. This means conference attendees have easy access to all of the restaurants, shops, and galleries in downtown Jackson.
We are lucky to live in one of the most beautiful places in the country. You may want to extend your stay to experience the wild lands and wildlife here as well as the vibrant arts and culture scene. We aim to create a community of writers that matches the vibrancy of the human and natural landscapes we call home.
