ABOUT THE BOOK
In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature…In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls “the dream of Black Studies”—abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Read more at UPM.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stefanie K. Dunning (She/Her) is associate professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. She is author of Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture. Her work has been published in African American Review, MELUS, Signs, and several other journals and anthologies. She sometimes publishes under the pen name Zeffie Gaines.
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR
Calvin Walds (He/Him) is a writer, educator, and abolitionist/image-maker/nomad originally from Detroit, MI. His writing has been published in No, Dear, African-American Review, Hyperallergic, Callaloo Journal, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Ctrl-V Journal, and are forthcoming in DIAGRAM and Black Warrior Review. As an educator, he has taught in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta, Ramallah, in the occupied Palestinian territories, and most currently in New York City. He was a finalist for the Emerge Surface Be fellowship, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, and long-listed for the Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize. He comes from a transdisciplinary academic background and is a MFA candidate at University of California-San Diego in Cross-Genre Writing. Right now, he is primarily interested in questions of fugitivity as an artistic practice and practice of resistance, anti-colonial African cinema, the poetics of relation, assemblage, Black experimental music, and the painter Beauford Delaney’s engagement with figuration and abstraction. Flee is his first chapbook.
UPCOMING PROGRAMMING & EVENTS
Registration for our facilitated discussion groups typically open 1-2 weeks in advance of the first session.
JUNE 19 | Visit The Tuxedo Project on Juneteenth!
Visit The Tuxedo Project on Juneteenth, as we celebrate the 2nd Anniversary of the Free Black Women’s Library-Detroit with an outdoor book exchange. This event is FREE and open to readers of all ages. Bring a book, get a book!
REGISTER FOR THE FULL WRITING WEEKEND (JUNE 4-6)
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DETROIT GREEN | PUBLIC EVENTS RSVPs
RSVP: SOURCE BOOKSELLERS AUTHOR EVENT (6/4 @ 6PM)
This event has passed. View the recording on YouTube.
Stefanie K. Dunning, author of Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, in conversation w/Detroit Green instructor Calvin Walds.
RSVP: DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST VIRTUAL WATCH PARTY (6/5 @ 7PM)
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RSVP: DETROIT GREEN OPEN MIC (6/6 @ 2PM)
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