Honorary Degree Recipient
Camille Dungy
Camille Dungy is an award-winning author and editor who has worked tirelessly to expand the realm of nature literature and environmental studies by bringing African-American voices into the canon.
Dungy works as a University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University, where the courses she teaches include Environmental Writing and African American Literature.
She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. This groundbreaking anthology, the first of its kind, has helped shaped the way that contemporary nature literature is taught in universities across the country.
A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies.
Through interviews, podcasts, talks, and panel discussions, Camille Dungy has been a tireless advocate working to expand the ways in which readers, scholars, and literary critics approach nature writing.