VOICES

Book Signing & Tea
POSTPONED – Stay tuned for the upcoming date

Stiles African American Heritage Center
2607 Glenarm Place, Denver

Free & open to the public
Books will be available for purchase on site.

We are hosting the one final spring tea at the Stiles African American Heritage Center on Saturday, June 3rd. Along with the Rocky Mountain Land Library, we will be welcoming Camille Dungy for a book signing of her new book, SOIL, the Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Neighbors & friends are welcome to meet Camille, hear a bit of her tale & see how the Stiles Gardens are unfolding. Books will be available for purchase on site.

The Stiles Gardens are well underway!
A work in progress, we are still gathering plants and their stories to add to the emergent gardens around the Stiles Center. Taking a community-centered approach, we invite folks to bring significant plants and their stories to include in the gardens. Instead of having a ‘master plan’, we like to learn about the plants, how big they will grow and what plants will make good companions. We then work together to find a good place for them to thrive. We are particularly interested in tea and medicine plants, natives that can thrive in a no-water steppe garden, and plants that support birds and wildlife in this urban corridor.

More about SOIL

From Simon & Schuster

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in 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.

Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an and an American Book Award. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Thank you to the Rocky Mountain Land Library
The Rocky Mountain Land Library’s mission is to help connect people to nature and the land. The need for places of quiet thought, creative pursuits, and active community involvement will only grow as our population increases. The residential library we will establish will give everyone access not only to the books, but also to the surrounding lands — a learning landscape for generations to come.