Event 1 in The Craft of Blackness Part Two (A CAAPP Black Study). 

Virtual Reading & Conversation with the brilliant Camille T. Dungy & Charif Shanahan. Both guests will share work, participate in a moderated conversation, and engage in audience Q&A.

Conversation moderator: CAAPP Managing Director Steffan Triplett

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Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017); Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011) winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize; Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010) winner of the American book award in 2010; and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006).

Dungy is the author of two essay collections. Her debut, Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then toddler, intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child, but as black women. The Kirkus Review noted of this lyrical memoir, “Each essay flows smoothly into the next, and they are all interlinked with themes of race, fear, joy, and love, bringing readers eye to eye with the experiences of being a black female poet, lecturer, mother, and woman. Forthright, entertaining, often potent essays that successfully intertwine personal history and historical context regarding black and white in America.”

Her essay collection, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023), functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

Dungy is the editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets. About the anthology, a Booklist starred review notes, “Just as nature is too often defined as wilderness when, in fact, nature is everywhere we are, our nature poetry is too often defined by Anglo-American perspectives, even though poets of all backgrounds write about the living world. Dungy enlarges our understanding of the nexus between nature and culture, and introduces a ‘new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans.'” Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. Dungy serves as the poetry editor for Orion magazine.

Dungy is also the editor of several other anthologies, including From the Fishouse (Persea, 2009) and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006).

Dungy is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Diane Middlebrook Residency Fellowship of the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and other organizations. She was the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her poems and essays have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, nearly thirty other anthologies, and over one hundred print and online journals.

Dungy is currently University Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023), which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), his meditative and trenchant debut which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award.

In arresting lyric poems, Shanahan centers the racial periphery and explores the impact of our colonial pasts (and present) on the most intimate aspects of our lives. Ocean Vuong praised Trace Evidence as “astute, subversively reserved, and propulsive… a truly magical achievement.” The collection has received wide praise for its ability to pursue universal spiritual questions through the lens of our most urgent social issues, with remarkable lyric precision: the result is a deeply poignant meditation on human separateness, rooted equally in the physical and metaphysical worlds, that reaches beyond constructed social divisions to our shared humanity.

Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco; and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation in Griante, Italy, the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul, France, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among other awards and recognitions.

Shanahan’s poems appear widely, in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Furious Flower’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020).

He holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University; an MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Dartmouth College; and an MFA in Poetry from NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. Former Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he has taught literature and language at California College of the Arts (CCA), the Collegio di Milano (Italy), New York University, and Stanford University. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

The Craft of Blackness: Camille Dungy & Charif Shanahan