We are honored to host a poetry reading by Camille T. Dungy followed by a dialogue with Camille T. Dungy, Odette England, and Dionne Lee. The theme of this event is the historical and poetic connections to the land, from various perspectives. An artist reception at the Gregory Allicar Museum will follow the conversation.

Friday, September 3, 5:30 to 7 pm Mountain Time

Please Note a change in this event. The event will be live and recorded. The recording will be shared with our audience after the conversation.

The conversation will be at the Organ Recital Hall at the University Center for The Arts, 1400 Remington Street, Fort Collins, CO 80523

Camille T. Dungy:

Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.

Dungy’s other poetry collections are Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), winner of the American Book Award, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison(Red Hen Press, 2006), finalist for PEN the Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (Persea, 2009), and served as assistant editor on Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, 100 Best African American Poems, nearly 30 other anthologies, plus dozens of print and online venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, VQR, Guernica, and Poets.org. Other honors include two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, two NAACP Image Award nominations, two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations, fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and fellowships from the NEA in both poetry and prose. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins, CO with her husband and child.

Odette England:

Through photography, image archives, and text, Odette England explores home, autobiography, female labor, and ritual. The isolated community in which she was raised and snapshots made by her extended family serve as raw material and inspiration.

She often manipulates her negatives and prints, intervening with their surfaces. She uses expired film, broken cameras, and tainted chemistry.

Many of the images England creates are unique, in keeping with the stories they reference. She mixes preciousness and the unrepeatable with low-fi processes.

Odette England has exhibited her work in more than 100 museums, galleries, and art spaces worldwide including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.

Recent honors include a $42,500 unrestricted grant as Artist-In-Residence Fellow at Amherst College (2020-21), Light Work $5,000 Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, and Silver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship. She was nominated for the Prix Pictet, the global award for photography and sustainability. Other grant awards include Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (in 2018 and 2019), Anonymous Was a Woman (2020), and the CENTER $5,000 Project Launch Award (2012). She was shortlisted for the 2021 Film Photo Award, Penumbra Workspace Program, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Award.

Among many artist residencies, she collaborated with artist and Guggenheim Fellow Jennifer Garza-Cuen at the invitation-only Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Radius Books will publish their joint photography project, Past Paper // Present Marks, awarded the $5,000 Rauschenberg Publication Grant, in 2021. For this project, the pair made almost 200 unique camera-less photographs by submerging expired photo-paper once owned by Rauschenberg in his swimming pool.

England’s critically-acclaimed edited volume, Keeper of the Hearth (Schilt Publishing, 2020) was named a Photobook of the Year by American Suburb X, LensCulture, Lenscratch, The Luupe, and What Will You Remember. This book was part of her three-year Winter Garden Photograph Project, in which she invited more than 200 photographers from around the world to reimagine the family snapshot Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida (1980). The Houston Center for Photography hosted a major five-month exhibition for the entire project.

She hold an MA in Communication Culture and Language from the University of South Australia, an MFA in Photography with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, and she received a scholarship to complete her PhD at the Australian National University.

England writes essays and reviews for numerous journals, magazines, and blogs including photo-eye and Strange Fire Collective.

Dionne Lee:

Dionne Lee works in photography, collage, and video, to investigate ideas around power and racial histories in relation to the American landscape. She has exhibited work at the Museum of Modern Art (New Photography 2020), Aperture Foundation, the school of the International Center of Photography in New York City, and throughout the Bay Area including Aggregate Space, Interface gallery, LAND AND SEA, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2019 she was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and a finalist for the SFMoMA SECA and San Francisco Artadia awards. Her solo show, Running, rigging, wading, was an Art Forum Magazine’s Critic’s Pick in 2019. 

Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017.