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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

SOIL

Camille T. Dungy

The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it. Definitive and singular, Soil 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. Camille T. Dungy is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an and an American Book Award. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

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Book Published 2023-05-02 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

In Soil, Camile Dungy welcomes us into an abundant, intimate, unfurling space... To dig in the dirt, we learn, is also to dig up and into history, identity, ecology, hope. Dungy shows, by example, how to honor the pain and the possibility of whatever fraught, holy ground we each call home. A deeply life-giving book.

An artful conversational confession with a personal and conversational vulnerability... Dungy winds Earth's care into human justice and wildness, then tends the story of connections past, present and to come... Camille is our perennial flower, bloomed again in Soil.

Camille Dungy is one of the greatest American writers, period. And Soil is her finest work yet. In prose that is personal, political, urgent, and honest... Soil is a delicate and resilient exploration of gardening, motherhood, memory, love, and what it means to thrive as a Black woman tending her garden, her family, and her career in a white supremacist ecosystem.

Dungy's identity as a Black mother offers an inclusive and more realistic style of nature writing... Dungy's poetic ear illuminates her language, whether listing botanical names or reflecting on the tumult of the 2020s. A significant, beautiful, meditative, and wholly down-to-earth memoir with high appeal for book groups and nature lovers.

What an intoxicating book. Dungy's words smell of rot, roots, and blossoms. She brings proof that incantations for nature can come from a yard in a subdivision, and that a family can turn hard soil into life.

May 3, 2023: A fascinating and thoughtful conversation between the author and LitHub's Lauren LeBlanc. In their conversation, LeBlanc asks Dungy about the experience of writing this memoir that is both personal and political, and they dig a bit deeper into the author's influences, her intentions, and her artistic vision for the book. Read more...

Camille Dungy's Soil is an instant classic. Provocative, beautifully written, and also wildly informative, this memoir cum manifesto asks us to contemplate our responsibility to our land - and each other. I felt transformed by this graceful and generous book.

Throughout, Dungy deftly interconnects environment and social justice issues... A poignant portrait of life and its challenges, told through the beauty of nature.

...like the garden at its center, poet Camille T. Dungy's Soil blossoms in vivid hues, radiating love and illuminating the tangled roots of nature and ecology.

Fans of Dungy's poetry will delight in her sparkling prose, and the wide-ranging meditations highlight the connections between land, freedom, and race. It's a lyrical and pensive take on what it means to put down roots.

Dungy offers...a complex, nuanced story in which the experience of nature is vital but is also entangled with race, national and family history, motherhood, and more... deeply felt, fluidly written, and never boring.