The Place of Poetry: An Evening on Eco-Writing with Jenny Browne and Camille T. Dungy

Join us for a FREE reading at Trinity University!

October 19, 2023, 7-8:30pm
Trinity University, Margarite B. Parker Chapel, Free and Open to the Public
Directions to the Margarite B. Parker Chapel at Trinity

Join us on Thursday, October 19th, for an evening with Gemini Ink 2023 Recipient of the Award for Literary Excellence Jenny Browne, and award-winning poet, essayist, and editor Camille T. Dungy. These two contemporary poets at the top of their craft will discuss how their place-based writing addresses the increasingly complicated relationships humans have to the environment, whether manmade or wild. 

This discussion will examine the role of the literary arts in addressing an ever-changing environment. How do we use writing to bring attention to our planet’s ecological crisis while exploring the intricate connection between humans and nature? How do we deepen our relationship to the earth and celebrate the wonder of the natural world? Don’t miss an opportunity to spend time with two thought-provoking literary voices! 

The evening will include an audience Q&A and a book signing and reception following the author talk. The event takes place in the Margarite B. Parker Chapel at Trinity University.

This event is co-sponsored by Trinity University’s Humanities Collective.

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.

Jenny Browne is the author of four collections: Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (2019), Dear Stranger (2014), The Second Reason (2007), and At Once (2003). She earned her MFA from the James Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. She served concurrent terms as City of San Antonio Poet Laureate (2016-18) and Poet Laureate of the State of Texas (2018) and in 2020 was Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. In the introduction to Browne’s New and Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye praised Browne’s vivid depictions of place and the strangeness of both life and language, “Her exuberant poems, rich with definite cadences, deep curiosities, and multi-layered textures, voices, and personalities, feel like wake-up calls. As if they say, Here is this life I find myself in, which fascinates and confounds me. Have we paid enough attention lately?” Browne teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio.