Commencement

Western Colorado University is pleased to announce Camille Dungy as the 2024 Commencement Speaker.

Camille Dungy is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University whose widely acclaimed and award-winning poetry and prose explores the intersections between literature, environmental action, history, and culture. Her latest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2023. Dungy is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press: 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton & Co: 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

In addition to her teaching and writing, she has served in a number of editorial positions. She hosts Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that examines the materials of art and what they can reveal about history and humanity. Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry.