Registration required:
2 sessions / $125
SOLD OUT
Join us at the Poetry Society for this two-session seminar on the poetry of Anne Spencer, led by Camille T. Dungy.
From her home and garden in Lynchburg, Virginia, Anne Spencer wrote poems of extraordinary vision and lasting power. Her singular voice and style have kept her a beloved poet for core admirers, and a number of circumstances have fueled a broadening revival of interest in her life and work. Though most of Spencer’s poems were published nearly a century ago, in many ways, she is the perfect poet for our current times. Spencer’s ecological, anti-racist, womanist, and self-empowered poems reveal the clarity and strangeness of her conscientiously intellectual, political, and creative life. In this class, we’ll consider some of Spencer’s most intriguing poems while discussing the world out of which and to which she wrote them. Camille Dungy will facilitate close readings of key poems, and will situate the poems, and the poet, in their historical contexts. The course will also explore Spencer’s formal innovations, her thematic concerns, and her life as a Black woman and poet in the early and mid-twentieth-century American South.
This is an online seminar. Sessions will be held via Zoom.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
A limited number of scholarships are available to cover or subsidize the cost of tuition. To inquire about scholarship opportunities, email Parker Menzimer at parker@poetrysociety.org.
