John McPhee, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and Peter Matthiessen are all great American nature writers. None of them are black, yet African-Americans have written about the natural world since long before the American Revolution. They bring a different way of looking at the environment than their white counterparts.
For the first time, the anthology “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry” collects black authors’ thoughts about the natural world. It was published late last year by the University of Georgia Press.
“At this moment when our culture is assessing both its relationship to the natural world and its relationship with its black citizens,” wrote Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of “Rope,” “The timing could not be better for such a comprehensive look at what black poets have contributed to our understanding of nature.”
Her review appeared on the University of Georgia Press Web page.
Poet and professor Camille Dungy of San Francisco University edited the collection. She is the author of “What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison”, and teaches creative writing. She arranged the collection around ideas, instead of chronologically. Among them are power negotiations between humans, insects, and other creatures sharing nature; open spaces; positive transformation; alienation from the land; and history.
University of California, Berkeley held a symposium March 4-5 to explore those ideas. Dungy was in attendance, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners Natasha Tretheway and Robert Haas, and many others.
Poet and Berkeley professor Cecil Giscombe said, “The event went well—the panel and the readings were well-attended and writers and audience members debated questions about what the term ‘nature’ might include, the conventions (public and/or implicit) of black writing, and the color of the environmental consciousness movement.”
In a statement before the event, he said he had Googled “black nature writing” and “African American nature writing,” and gotten nine and four hits, respectively. Black writers are well known for music, politics, and fiction, but despite their many contributions to nature writing, they have been overlooked.
After the book’s publication and the symposium, there were thousands of hits for those phrases.
Giscombe said in a statement that he felt uneasy because the topic sometimes lent itself to nostalgia and a cliched yearning for simpler times. “Having a more complicated view of things is necessary. Inflecting the natural world while reflecting about life is complicated. Our identities are not discreet. They spill over, they trespass, they contradict. Our job as writers is to investigate the complexities of the world.”
For the first time, the anthology “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry” collects black authors’ thoughts about the natural world. It was published late last year by the University of Georgia Press.
“At this moment when our culture is assessing both its relationship to the natural world and its relationship with its black citizens,” wrote Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of “Rope,” “The timing could not be better for such a comprehensive look at what black poets have contributed to our understanding of nature.”
Her review appeared on the University of Georgia Press Web page.
Poet and professor Camille Dungy of San Francisco University edited the collection. She is the author of “What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison”, and teaches creative writing. She arranged the collection around ideas, instead of chronologically. Among them are power negotiations between humans, insects, and other creatures sharing nature; open spaces; positive transformation; alienation from the land; and history.
University of California, Berkeley held a symposium March 4-5 to explore those ideas. Dungy was in attendance, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners Natasha Tretheway and Robert Haas, and many others.
Poet and Berkeley professor Cecil Giscombe said, “The event went well—the panel and the readings were well-attended and writers and audience members debated questions about what the term ‘nature’ might include, the conventions (public and/or implicit) of black writing, and the color of the environmental consciousness movement.”
In a statement before the event, he said he had Googled “black nature writing” and “African American nature writing,” and gotten nine and four hits, respectively. Black writers are well known for music, politics, and fiction, but despite their many contributions to nature writing, they have been overlooked.
After the book’s publication and the symposium, there were thousands of hits for those phrases.
Giscombe said in a statement that he felt uneasy because the topic sometimes lent itself to nostalgia and a cliched yearning for simpler times. “Having a more complicated view of things is necessary. Inflecting the natural world while reflecting about life is complicated. Our identities are not discreet. They spill over, they trespass, they contradict. Our job as writers is to investigate the complexities of the world.”
