Black Nature bookcover

Black Nature

Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Afaa Weaver 

(Contribution by)

Kamilah Aisha Moon 

(Contribution by)

et al.

Audre Lorde 

(Contribution by)

Alice Walker 

(Contribution by)

Gwendolyn Brooks 

(Contribution by)

Gregory Pardlo 

(Contribution by)

Jessie Redmon Fauset 

(Contribution by)

James a Emanuel 

(Contribution by)

Ed Roberson 

(Contribution by)

Melvin Dixon 

(Contribution by)

Myronn Hardy 

(Contribution by)

Wanda Coleman 

(Contribution by)

Ravi Howard 

(Contribution by)

Toi Derricotte 

(Contribution by)

Clarence Major 

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Mona Lisa Saloy 

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C S Giscombe 

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Sterling a Brown 

(Contribution by)

June Jordan 

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Claude McKay 

(Contribution by)

Amber Flora Thomas 

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Margaret Walker 

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Reginald Shepherd 

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Robert Hayden 

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Melvin B. Tolson 

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Alvin Aubert 

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Ishmael Reed 

(Contribution by)

Cornelius Eady 

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Nikki Giovanni 

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Anne Spencer 

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Amaud Jamaul Johnson 

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Anthony Walton 

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Shane Book 

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Yusef Komunyakaa 

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James Weldon Johnson 

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Sherley Anne Williams 

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Helene Johnson 

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Jean Toomer 

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Thomas Sayers Ellis 

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Claudia Rankine 

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Patricia Smith 

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Paul Laurence Dunbar 

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Toni Wynn 

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Patricia Spears Jones 

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George Marion McClellan 

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E Miller 

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Evie Shockley 

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Arna Bontemps 

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Natasha Trethewey 

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Kwame Alexander 

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Estate Of Lucille Clifton 

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Ruth Ellen Kocher 

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Tim Seibles 

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers 

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Cyrus Cassells 

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Indigo Moor 

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Phillis Wheatley 

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Askia M Touré 

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Devorah Major 

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Major Jackson 

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Gerald Barrax 

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Albery Whitman 

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Tara Betts 

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Rita Dove 

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths 

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Kendra Yvette Hamilton 

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Shara McCallum 

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Ross Gay 

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Remica Bingham 

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Al Young 

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Wendy S. Walters 

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Elizabeth Alexander 

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G E Patterson 

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Sean Hill 

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Joanne Gabbin 

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Janice N. Harrington 

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Michael S. Harper 

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Richard Wright 

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Lenard Moore 

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Terrance Hayes 

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Carl Phillips 

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Mark McMorris 

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Marilyn Nelson 

(Contribution by)

Thylias Moss 

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Langston Hughes 

(Contribution by)

Frank X. Walker 

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George Moses Horton 

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Harryette Mullen 

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Cynthia Parker-Ohene 

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Stephanie Pruitt 

(Contribution by)

Douglas Kearney 

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Description

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.

Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.

Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.

Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

A Friends Fund Publication.

Product Details

PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
Publish DateDecember 01, 2009
Pages432
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780820334318
Dimensions8.9 X 5.9 X 1.0 inches | 1.4 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

About the Author

CAMILLE T. DUNGY is the University Distinguished Professor in English at Colorado State University. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy currently serves as the poetry editor for Orion magazine. She is also coeditor of From the Fishouse, and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Dungy is the recipient of honors including the 2021 American Academy of Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and prose. Her poems and essays have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, more than forty other anthologies, and over one hundred print and online journals.
KENDRA Y. HAMILTON is an associate professor of English and director of Southern Studies at Presbyterian College. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, and in the anthologies Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; and Shaping Memories: Reflections of 25 African American Women Writers.
SEAN HILL is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 2003 and was awarded a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in 2006. Hill's poems have been published widely in journals, including Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares.
MAJOR JACKSON's debut volume of poems, Leaving Saturn, selected by poet and novelist Al Young to receive the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet, was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and has received critical attention in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Grand Street, Post Road, the New Yorker, among other literary journals. Formerly the Literary Arts Curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, he is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a commission from The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. In 2003, he received the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. He has given readings around the country and participated in many festivals including Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Poetry Society of America's Festival of New American Poets, and The New Yorker Festival in Bryant Park, New York City. He is a graduate of Temple University and University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. Major Jackson is an associate professor of English at University of Vermont, a faculty member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, and a former Witter Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
CLARENCE MAJOR is a prizewinning poet, painter, and novelist. He is the author of thirteen previous books of poetry. As a finalist for a National Book Award he won a bronze medal for his book Configurations: New and Selected Poems, 1958-1998. Among other awards he is also the recipient of a National Council on the Arts Award, a New York Cultural Foundation Award, and the Stephen Henderson Poetry Award for Outstanding Achievement, all three for poetry. His poetry has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and periodicals, in English and in foreign languages. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Davis.
MARK McMORRIS is author of The Black Reeds (Georgia) and other collections. He has published his poems in New American Writing, Callaloo, Conjunctions, and other journals. McMorris is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 2012-14. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Thrall, Domestic Work, Bellocq's Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.
FRANK W WALKER is the 2013-2014 poet laureate of Kentucky. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. A Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient, he is the author of five collections of poetry, including Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride.
MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998) wrote poetry, essays, the novel Jubilee, and a biography of Richard Wright. She created pioneering programs in the humanities and African American studies at Jackson State University, where she was a faculty member for almost three decades.

Reviews

Black Nature is the most exciting anthology of poetry I've read in years. In part this reflects the superb quality and remarkable range of Camille Dungy's selections. But it also comes from her decision to organize the book's contents into ten thematic "cycles" rather than chronologically. Each of the sections responds distinctively and dramatically to Lucille Clifton's question with which Dungy frames the entire volume: "why/is there under that poem always/ an other poem?" This collection will quickly become essential reading for poets and scholars, as well as for courses on American poetry and the literature of nature.--John Elder "author of Reading the Mountains of Home"

Camille Dungy believes that white and black poets look differently at nature, with whites primarily noticing its beauty and blacks seeing its harshness. The view, Dungy says, is intensified by the black experience of slavery. An edgy mix of pastoral and political, her anthology, Black Nature, testifies to her point.

-- "Baltimore Sun"

Dungy has compiled what might have taken a lifetime to assemble, yet here it is at this moment when our culture is assessing both its relationship to the natural world and its relationship with its black citizens. The timing could not be better for such a comprehensive look at what black poets have contributed to our understanding of nature. What excites about this anthology is that it is not only the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems by black poets I have read, it is the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems about nature that I have read. I believe the book should be widely read, taught, and talked about.

--Alison Hawthorne Deming "author of Rope"

Just as nature is too often defined as wilderness when, in fact, nature is everywhere we are, our nature poetry is too often defined by Anglo-American perspectives, even though poets of all backgrounds write about the living world. . . . Dungy enlarges our understanding of the nexus between nature and culture, and introduces a 'new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans.'

-- "Booklist"

No pleasures are more aesthetic than poetry and nature, so it is only natural that the two should unite. Editor Dungy here merges the worlds in a satisfying compilation that features over 100 poems by 93 African American poets, including celebrated writers June Jordan and Yusef Komunyakaa as well as newer artists like Remica L. Bingham and Indigo Moor.

-- "Library Journal"

One of the few anthologies that can be picked up and read like a novel cover to cover without metaphor overload. Black Nature is well thought out, well edited, and timed.

-- "Phati'tude Literary Magazine"

With extraordinary insight and substantial creative vision the rich synthesis of this anthology offers a strikingly original contour to the seasons of black poets and poetry. The critical wisdom accumulated here is as important as the beautifully structured cycles that Dungy uses as landscaped categories to contain these important poems. The methodology here is as graceful as it is rigorously intelligent. Dungy's anthology is a major contribution to twenty-first century Black Studies.

--Karla FC Holloway "author of BookMarks: Reading in Black and White--A Memoir"
Camille Dungy's anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, offers a fresh new vision of the African American poetic canon. In eliciting black poems that redefine the Western tradition of nature poetry, she has provided a new configuration for African American poetry, one that is postmodern and neo-pastoralist. Black Nature expands the horizon of black poetry from the frequently anthologized themes of blues, social commentary, and urban pastoral and demonstrates that black is also green, a theme consonant with the twenty-first century. Publishing many young poets writing since the post Black Arts Movement, Dungy's Black Nature achieves a contemporary emphasis. It is ideal for introductory and advanced African American literature courses.--Robert Chrisman, editor-in-chief "The Black Scholar"

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