Poet Camille Dungy to Give Reading of Forthcoming Poetry Collection at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Distinguished poet Camille Dungy will give a reading of her forthcoming book of poems titled What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave For Poison on Feb. 24 at 1:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event is free and open to the public.

The book, scheduled for release by Red Hen Press on March 1, is a collection of rogue sonnets describing characters that regularly question or defy restrictions and expectations. Dungy, who heard from her grandparents many stories of the struggles that blacks endured before the civil rights movement, uses the experiences of individual African-Americans to explore 20th-century American life, specifically the role of race in the development and sustenance of personal relationships and aspirations.

Dungy is associate professor of English and the coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has been a John Atherton Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Once the Writer-in-Residence at Rocky Mountain National Park, Dungy has also been awarded fellowships and residencies by the Norton Island/Eastern Frontier Society, The Corporation of Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.

The event is sponsored by Africana Studies.