Anyway, to help us welcome Camille Dungy,
I'd like to welcome Aisha Sabatini
Sloan who works in the education programs at the Poetry Center.
Aisha is the author of the essay collection,
The Fluency of Light.
Her second book, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
is forthcoming next year.
Aisha.
Hi.
So full today.
I'm so honored to have been asked to do this.
I've been a really big fan of Camille Dungy's
for a long time, and I'm very happy you're here.
And pardon me for a personal intro,
I had an experience that really lends itself
to this introduction last week, so.
Last week I was taking a hike at a residency in Southeast
Oregon, and the trail turned on what I feared
might be private property, which we'd been warned not to go on
to and a loud shot rang out.
I turned around and I ran, and as I acted out
my own version of an action adventure film,
stumbling down the hill and peeking
over rocks, holding my--
I hiked like this for a little while,
holding my hands in the air screaming, "Hello, help."
I could tell how silly I looked.
And it took me a while before I had the courage
to return back the way I came.
As I made my way down the path, hands in prayer,
I kept picturing the cover of an anthology
that Camille Dungy edited called Black Nature.
Poems that meditate on the many ways
Black bodies move in the natural world.
I remembered a class that I taught last spring
in a cabin in the woods.
The wind pounding at the door as we discussed work
from that anthology, the way James Emanuel
retold the story of Emmett Till as though it were a fairy tale.
Dungy writes in the introduction,
"The poems described moss, rivers, trees, dirt, caves,
dogs, fields.
Elements of an environment steeped
in a legacy of violence.
Forced labor, torture, and death,
are these not meditations on nature?"
I tried to feel the company of all the voices collected
in that anthology as I made my way back to my cabin,
and I also thought, oh good, now I
have something to say for the introduction.
Although I was genuinely terrified.
In addition to editing an incredible anthology that
offers Black hikers solace when they worry
they are under attack in the woods,
Miss Dungy has written three books of poetry, Smith Blue,
Suck on the Marrow, which I can't tear out of my father's
hands, and What to Eat, What to Drink,
What to Leave for Poison.
She will soon release a collection of essays entitled,
Guidebook to Relative Strangers, which
has been described as a stunningly
graceful and honest exploration of race,
motherhood, and history.
She has received pretty much every single award
and fellowship.
She teaches at Colorado State University,
and Nikki Giovanni has described her work
as a garden of verses that spring up with the sunshine
or hide with you in the dusk.
Please join me in welcoming Camille Dungy.
I'm glad you made it out.
Yeah, me too.