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Black Nature:
A Symposium on the First Anthology of
Nature Writing by African-American Poets

	A several-day event at the UC Berkeley campus will celebrate the publication of the first-ever anthology of nature writing by African-American poets. The volume, entitled Black Nature, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in December 2009. The editor of the anthology is the poet, Prof. Camille Dungy, of San Francisco State University. The event will be hosted and introduced by Prof. Dungy and by UC Berkeley Professors Robert Hass and Cecil Giscombe (a contributor to the anthology). This publication of Black Nature is a significant event in American letters. The natural world has a long history as a topic in American literature, but all previous discussion of nature writing has focused on the work of white authors. Nature writing, as a literary category, has continued to exist as a white category; the tables of contents of national and regional anthologies bear this out. Black Nature, which includes the work of 93

	writers, reaches back as far as Phillis Wheatley, and it extends through the modernist examples of GwendolynBrooks and Robert Hayden to the contemporary avant-garde work of Clarence Major and Harryette Mullen. Six contributors to Black Nature, including the writers Clarence Major,Harryette Mullen, Ed Roberson, Evie Shockley, Natasha Tretheway, and Al Young, will read from their work and
participate in public discussions on the literary and environmental issues raised by the new anthology. These writers are authors of major texts and have seen their work honored by Guggenheim Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Gertrude Stein Award, American Book Awards, and other major award and distinctions.		"Or this is the way we’re brought to the natural, as the natural. Nature is quantity, its own surface and opaque and mysterious and threatening and, obviously, erotic
Dates: March 4, 5, 6, 2010 Please RSVP below Location:The Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley Campus Guest Speakers: Harryette Mullen, Professor of English, UC Los Angeles, TBC Ed Roberson, Lecturer, Northwestern University Carl Phillips, Professor of English, Washington University Evie Shockley, Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University Natasha Tretheway, Professor of English, Emory University in Atlanta Al Young, Poet, novelist, musician, screenwriter, and educator		because of all that, but knowable via certain conventions, discernible,readable…. Our words don’t mean—it’s our bodies that mean, that’s where our nature is. And because of this we have no particular agency there, in the depiction of nature—our bodies are “primitive” and “jungle” and therefore we are not other enough from the natural world to be able to find metaphors of ourselves there. Instead, we are the natural world, we’re ripe: upon us can be projected metaphors by nature writers or writers about human nature."
Click here for more information on the guest speakers and panelists Sponsored by: The Berkeley Institute of the Environment The UC Berkeley Department of English San Francisco State University

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