Episode 97: Camille Dungy

Dear Listener,

Another year has come and gone. If you’re reading this, we’re still alive, but we have work to do. Work within ourselves, within our communities, and within society. What are your resolutions or intentions for the time we live in?

If you’re not sure how to answer this question, you’re not alone. But the first step to living in a new world is imagining it. It’s easy to look back at this year and see everything sliding ever further down a slope toward the point of no return. It’s easy to look back and see where things could have been different. It’s harder to hope, but that’s what this time of year asks of each of us: to imagine spring around the corner as we respect the necessity of winter.

In our 97th episode, Camille Dungy looks back on two years of pandemic life and shares her end-of-year intentions and uneasy blessings. She discusses making decisions that resist inequality and her lifelong practice of listening to the Greater Than Human world—themes which recur throughout her many book projects.

 Camille T. Dungy is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. Her newest book, Soil: The History of a Black Mother's Garden is due from Simon & Schuster in 2023. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009), the first anthology to bring African American poetry about the natural world to national attention. It remains a standard-bearer today. Dungy also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (Persea, 2009), featuring poems from the ground-breaking online archive of emerging poets she co-founded in 2005, and she served as assistant editor on Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006), the first national publication to feature the work of Cave Canem's fellows and faculty. She is currently the poetry editor for Orion magazine, one of America’s oldest and most honored publications. Dungy's work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Essays, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, the Pushcart Anthology, and more than 30 other anthologies plus dozens of print and online venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award Nominations, to Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry. Dungy is a University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

LISTEN TO EPISODE 97 HERE!

‎All Commonplace patrons will be given access to audio of Camille Dungy reading poems from her many books, one of her writing exercises that she teaches in her classes for refreshing clichés, and audio of Ed Roberson and Tiana Clark reading at Northwestern University for Black Poetics and Environmental Memory. Members of our Commonplace Book Club will also have their name entered into a raffle to receive one of the following books:

• Camille Dungy, Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)

• Camille Dungy, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011)

• Camille Dungy, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010)

• Camille Dungy, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006)

• Camille Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton, 2017)

• Yusef Komunyakaa, Magic City (Wesleyan University Press, 1992)

• The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics & Motherhood, ed. Patricia Dienstfrey & Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)

• Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections, ed. Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker (University of Iowa Press, 2008)

Thanks to W. W. Norton, Wesleyan University Press, Southern Illinois University Press,Red Hen Press, and University of Iowa Press for donating books!

To become a Commonplace Book Club Member or a patron of the podcast at any level please sign up for our Patreon!

In the coming months look out for additional conversations with Douglas Kearney and other lecturers from the Bagley Wright Lecture Series as well as conversations with Torrey Peters, Liz Lerman, and more.

Join the discussion on social media! What are your New Year intentions? What would you like to see from Commonplace in the new year? You can Tweet at us, DM us on Instagram, talk to us on Speakpipe, leave us a voice message at (347) 762-3405, or even just reply to this email.

As always, thank you for listening and for your continued support.

Love and solidarity,

Valentine & the Commonplace Team