Camille T. Dungy to deliver Grace Adams Tanner Lecture in Human Values2 min read

Guggenheim Fellow to present annual lecture through Eccles A.P.E.X. series

 

Cedar City, UT — Renowned author, poet, scholar, and “Immaterial” podcast host Camille T. Dungy will visit Southern Utah University on October 3 to deliver the 43rd Grace Adams Tanner Lecture in Human Values. Her lecture and reading will be held in the Gilbert Great Hall of the Hunter Alumni Center at 11:30 a.m. “Soil, African Diaspora, and American Land” is a free event and open to all campus and community members. After, there will be a reception and book signing at 12:30 p.m.

Named after her 2023 publication “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden,” her lecture will discuss “why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the
environment is the best means of protecting it” as well as “the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live.” “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 shortlisted for the PEN/Jean
Stein Award.

“The Grace A. Tanner Center offers a Human Values Certificate that annually includes a different part of Southern Utah University's strategic plan: ‘Connecting People, Purpose, and Place,’” said Tanner Center Director Danielle Dubrasky. “We are thrilled to have Camille T. Dungy at SUU to give this distinguished lecture, as it ties into this year’s theme of Human Values and a Sense of Place.”

Dungy has also written four collections of poetry, including “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.

A 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 the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.

The Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values seeks to promote access to scholarly and scientific learning in all areas of human values which embrace moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual concepts. For more information about the Grace A. Tanner Center Lecture in Human Values and the center as a whole, visit suu.edu/tanner.

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