Yewande Omotoso asks Camille Dungy about her latest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. They delve into nature writing, gardening, radical generosity, writing revisions, the ethics of fellowship grants, hope and resilience.

Yewande Omotoso trained as an architect and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She is the Vice-President and Treasurer of PEN South Africa. Her debut novel Bom Boy (Modjaji Books, 2011) won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize. Yewande was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. Her second novel The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus, 2016) has been translated into Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Korean. An Unusual Grief (Cassava Republic, 2022) is her third novel.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009). She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

In this episode we are in solidarity with Egyptian poet and lyricist Galal El-Behairy. We call on the authorities in Egypt to free him. You can read more about his case here: https://www.pen-international.org/news/poet-galal-el-behairy-marks-two-years-in-arbitrary-pre-trial-detention

As tributes to him, Camille reads extracts from El-Behairy’s “A Letter from Tora Prison” and Yewande reads Camille’s poem “Trophic Cascade”.

This podcast series is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to promote open conversation and highlight shared histories.