In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado, which limited what residents could plant in their gardens. In resistance to these restrictive policies, Dungy employs 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.

Registration is required. Please register on Jenkins Arboretum & Gardens' EventBrite listing.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2, 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry. 

Arbo-READ-um is a summer series born from a partnership between Tredyffrin Public Library and Jenkins Arboretum & Gardens. We work together to provide opportunities to promote literacy, library and arboretum usage, and community conversations through a shared read. 

This program fulfills PA Forward's Civic and Social Literacy: "The ability to positively impact the community, engage in respectful discussions, understand civic roles and responsibilities, participate in community activities, and drive positive change."