In conversation with Abra Lee

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a debut personal essay collection that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison; Suck on the Marrow; Smith Blue; and Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. The editor of three poetry anthologies, Dungy is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and an American Book Award. She is an English professor at Colorado State University and hosts the podcast Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. In Soil, she delves into her seven-year quest to diversify her garden in spite of her community’s strict horticultural rules, exposing larger truths about the danger homogeneity poses to our planet.

Abra Lee is a storyteller, horticulturist, and author of the forthcoming book Conquer The Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country’s Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers. She has spent a whole lotta time in the dirt as a municipal arborist and airport landscape manager. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Fine Gardening, Veranda Magazine, and NPR. Lee is a graduate of Auburn University College of Agriculture and an alumna of the Longwood Gardens Society of Fellows, a global network of public horticulture professionals.