Camille T. Dungy & Kate Schatz: New Books in Conversation
Poet and Guggenheim fellow Camille T. Dungy joins feminist author Kate Schatz to discuss their new works exploring American identity, history, and belonging.
Why we picked this
Dungy is one of the more serious poets working in America right now — her Guggenheim-winning work on Black motherhood, nature, and place gives this evening genuine weight alongside Schatz's historical fiction.
Camille T. Dungy is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University and one of contemporary American poetry’s most decorated voices — the recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her new collection, America, A Love Story, examines love, family, and art against the backdrop of contemporary American life. Her previous book Soil was widely praised for its interweaving of Black maternal experience and the natural world.
Joining her is Kate Schatz, the New York Times bestselling author of the “Rad Women” series and co-author of Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book with W. Kamau Bell. Her new novel Where the Girls Were is set in 1968 San Francisco, following a teenager sent to a home for unwed mothers — a work of historical fiction that recovers an era of women’s hidden lives.
The conversation at Tattered Cover Aspen Grove brings two writers together whose new books, though formally different, both circle questions of American identity and what gets erased from the record. There will be Q&A and signing to follow.