The University of Maine at Farmington’s Visiting Writers Series will open the new academic year with a reading by poet and author Camille T. Dungy.

Dungy will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19, in The Landing in the Olsen Student Center, South Street in Farmingon.

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 other poetry collections are “Smith Blue” (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award, “Suck on the Marrow” (Red Hen Press, 2010), winner of the American Book Award, and “What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison” (Red Hen Press, 2006), finalist for PEN the Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.

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 a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

The free event is sponsored by the UMF Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, according to a news release from UMF.

For more information, contact April Mulherin, UMF Associate Director for Media Relations, at 778-7081 or [email protected].