Author and poet Camille Dungy was the speaker for the LGC Lecture Series at Lauritzen Gardens November 7, 2024. LGC members had the privilege of meeting her for dinner before her presentation. Camille discussed her book, Soil, the Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.

“The green of growing things calms me. Plants stabilize me,” Camille Dungy writes in Soil, this brilliant and beautiful memoir of her deepening relationship with the earth, a relationship, a deepening, that necessarily demands she consider questions of family, history, race, nation, and power. The deepening demands we witness what erodes or frays or severs the stabilizing roots between us. Whatever seduces us into believing we are not in fact connected. To each other, to the earth. The soil though, just like Soil, teaches us we are connected. And fundamentally so. Let us try to listen. Let us put our hands in.” 
-Ross Gay

Members met to discuss the book earlier in the month.