CAMPFIRE Presents Camille Dungy
CAMPFIRE presents: Camille Dungy | Oct. 26, 6-7:30p at the Virginian Saloon
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A conversation on the soil, identity, motherhood and creativity with award-winning poet Camille Dungy – in collaboration with JHWriters
CAMPFIRE welcomes 2025 JH Writers Conference Keynote Speaker Camille Dungy for an exploration of the ecologies we cultivate — through our gardening, through our parenting and partnering, through our creative making, and through our engagement as the body politic.
Throughout her career, in luminous poetry and prose, Dungy has attended to questions of how we constitute, and nourish, relationships with one another and with the-more-than-human world. Our conversation will center around the questions Dungy explores in her acclaimed 2023 book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.
Here is how acclaimed poet Ross Gay describes Dungy’s vision: “‘The green of growing things calms me. Plants stabilize me,’ Camille Dungy writes in Soil, this brilliant and beautiful memoir of her deepening relationship with the earth, a relationship, a deepening, that necessarily demands she consider questions of family, history, race, nation, and power. The deepening demands we witness what erodes or frays or severs the stabilizing roots between us. Whatever seduces us into believing we are not in fact connected. To each other, to the earth. The soil though, just like Soil, teaches us we are connected. And fundamentally so. Let us try to listen. Let us put our hands in.”
Join us for this intimate conversation with one of America’s most prescient, and prophetic, thinkers on how it is we tend our common soil, our collective garden, as human beings.
Camille T. Dungy 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 five collections of poetry, including America, A Love Story, 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.
CAMPFIRE reimagines how we gather as community. Each month, we bring in guest speakers for a unique, participatory storytelling experience, hosted in a subtly ritualized framework, to explore what most drives, moves and inspires us.
Free and open to the public.
***Billy’s Burgers and fare from the Virginian Saloon available onsite / free to first-time attendees!***
CAMPFIRE gatherings are interactive, dynamic storytelling experiences that thrive on guest participation. Guests are encouraged to arrive early and stay late as we enjoy a festal ‘communion’ of food, libations, and conversation together. Above all, CAMPFIRE aims to create a space for anyone craving meaningful connection.
CAMPFIRE also supports regular small-group meet-ups for individuals keen on deepening conversation and connection over meals, film and article discussion, and skiing / hiking forays into the backcountry.
A project of St. John’s Episcopal Church, CAMPFIRE is an inclusive, celebratory community that affirms and honors the dignity and beauty of every human being. All are welcome, always.
