A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An award-winning African American poet debuts in prose with a stunningly graceful and honest exploration of race, motherhood, and history.
As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then toddler, intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child, but as black women. With a poet’s eye, she celebrates her daughter’s acquisition of language and discoveries of the natural and human world around her. At the same time history shadows her steps everywhere she goes: from the San Francisco of settlers’ and investors’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana; from snow-white Maine to a festive, yet threatening, bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods.
With exceptional candor and grace, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds—the intimate and vulnerable experiences of raising a child, living with illness, conversing with strangers, and counting on others’ goodwill. Across the nation, she finds fear and trauma, and also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, Guidebook to Relative Strangers is an essential guide for a troubled land.
Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning poet and editor and professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. She lives with her husband and child in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Table of Contents
By Way of Introduction xi
The Conscientious Outsider 1
Manifest 12
Body of Evidence 35
Inherent Risk, or What I Know About Investment: On Balancing A Career, A Child, and Creative Writing 70
Lap Child 95
A Shade North of Ordinary 110
Writing Home 130
Bounds 135
Tales From a Black Girl on Fire, or Why I Hate To Walk Outside And See Things Burning 171
