Writers & Books began the countywide Rochester Reads tradition in 2001 with Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying. In 2025, they have selected Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy.
Please join us for an in-person discussion of Soil at the library on Thursday, September 18, at 7:00 PM. If you’d like to attend, please register now through our Event Calendar.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
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Copies of Soil are available to reserve through the MCLS Online Catalog, and it’s also available digitally as an ebook (through Overdrive/Libby) or an audiobook (through Overdrive/Libby).
Published on August 26, 2025.
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