An Exploration of Race, Identity and History with Authors Camille T. Dungy and Nadia Owusu

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. 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.

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer, racial justice organizer, and urban planner. She is the author of Aftershocks: A Memoir, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2021, and selected as a BookExpo America “Buzz” book. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, Catapult, Quartz, The Washington Post’s The Lily and other publications. She was the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. As an Associate Director at Living Cities, Nadia leads the organization’s racial equity and inclusion and applied research portfolios. Recent highlights include spearheading efforts to articulate a new mission and vision that centers dismantling structural racism; designing equitable processes for hiring, talent management, and distributed leadership; developing a digital platform for practitioners working to close racial income and wealth gaps; and facilitating a multi-city effort focused on operationalizing racial equity and inclusion in local government operations, policy, and practice. Nadia is a graduate of Pace University (BA), Hunter College (MS), and of the Mountainview MFA program where she now teaches creative non-fiction.

Maryella Marie is a multimedia performance artist & activist focused on raising emotional intelligence through her work. California born, Georgia raised, Argentina based.