We are pleased to announce the Keynote Speaker for Green Week 2018:

Camille T. Dungy

Professor of English, Colorado State University

MFA, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (1997)

On April 22nd at 7pm at Overby Auditorium, the Environmental Studies Minor and the Office of Sustainability are thrilled to welcome Camille Dungy to address the University of Mississippi as the Earth Day Keynote Speaker for 2018. Camille Dungy is an award-winning poet and author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009) the first ever anthology specifically featuring nature writing by African American poets. She has been featured in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, as well as nearly thirty other anthologies.

In 2017, she debuted in prose with Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton), a collection of personal essays documenting her experiences as a poet-lecturer traveling the country with her infant daughter. In Guidebook, Dungy simultaneously explores the complicated relationships between history, race, and landscape while also giving voice to her intimate experience as a mother and a woman of color in our country.

In her collection of poems titled Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), Dungy gorgeously identifies the intersections between racial violence, environmental degradation, balance, destruction, and regeneration. Trophic Cascade is concerned with environmental despair but also triumph and survival. Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Pleasure Dome, has said of Trophic Cascade: 

“Earthly and visionary, a soulful reckoning for our twenty-first century, held in focus through echoes of the past and future, but always firmly rooted in now. Each poem is a bridge in the music of a language that we believe and trust, that heals.”

Dungy is the recipient of an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and a California Book Award silver medal. She has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Diane Middlebrook Residency Fellowship of the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, as well as other organizations.

The annual Earth Day keynote address will take place on Sunday, April 22nd, at 7pm. It will take place in Overby Auditorium. The event is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Department with support from the Office of Sustainability. Past keynotes have included David George Haskell, Linda Hogan, Paige West, and Rob Nixon. Green Week 2018 will take place April 16th-22nd. Check back for more updates about Green Week 2018, the Earth Day Keynote series, or click here to learn more about last year’s Green Week events.

To learn more about Camille Dungy, visit her website.

 

For syllabi consideration, this event’s applicable subject areas include, but are not limited to: African American Studies, literature, poetry, creative writing, and nature writing.