Evoking Place Through Sensory Writing: An Open Genre Workshop with Award-winning Eco-Writer Camille T. Dungy

Friday, October 20, 10am-1pm CST, in-person at Gemini Ink
Instructor: Camille T. Dungy
Nonmember: $135; Member: $115; Student: $75

*EARN CPE’S

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE. 

Place can be a tool for connection, history, freedom, discovery, and even tension. But how do we capture a setting with nuance so that a reader gains understanding and clarity of the world the story/poem lives in?

In this three-hour generative workshop, participants will examine passages that use strong sensory details to bring the texture, mood, geographic and/or aesthetic quirks of a place to life. We will then practice various approaches for generating descriptive language and apply it to our own work. 

Don’t miss this chance to spend a morning with one of the most intriguing literary voices of our time, who is a ground-breaking author in the world of eco-writing! Walk away with several starts to new pieces of work evoking a sense of place in thought-provoking, nuanced ways.

This course is open to writers of all genres and skill level, 18+. Students are encouraged to bring their favorite writing materials.

Students will leave this class with:

• An understanding of how setting can be used in creative writing
• Approaches to generating different kinds of sensory language
• The ability to use sensory details to evoke place
• Beginnings of several new pieces of work

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), 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. 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. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.