UNESCO City of Literature awards Paul Engle Prize to Iowa City West High alum

IOWA CITY — The Paul Engle Prize from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature represents some lofty virtues in literature: a pioneering spirit, active participation in the larger issues of the day, and betterment of the world through literary arts.

But to the 13th winner of the prize, it’s also something far more simple — a homecoming, of sorts.

Camille Dungy, a 1991 alum of Iowa City West High School, has collected a number of prestigious titles and awards through her career: University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Academy of American Poets fellow, Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow in prose and poetry, and the American Book Award among them.

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The one she received this week was different, though. Not because of the $25,000 prize or the custom M.C. Ginsberg art that comes with it, but because of the full-circle ties it represents to the hometown that built the foundation for her career.

In a world where literature can be elusive, Iowa City made being an author attainable in practice and as an identity. She already loved literature before attending her last three years of high school in Iowa City, but the writers she met there made writing jump off the page through everyday community.

“There are a lot of students who come to university never having met a living writer. You can’t not meet a living writer in Iowa City,” Dungy said. “It didn’t feel like I had to be Steph Curry.”

But what’s more is that the prize represents her naturalization as a “literary citizen,” a concept she says Paul Engle emblematized in the place where her contributions to literary society began.

In addition to his work as a poet, playwright, essayist, editor and critic, Engle was best remembered as the longtime director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He co-founded the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program with his wife, Hualing Nieh Engle. He lived from 1908 to 1991.

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Though she met Paul Engle only briefly in her youth, her contemporaries agree that she has carried his spirit through a lifetime of achievements. Engle died during her senior year of high school.

“What this prize recognizes is a lifetime of not just being a writer, but a literary citizen. That is quite an honor and has been something that has been important to how I shaped myself and my career,” Dungy told The Gazette. “It feels more like a passing of a baton than a handing of a plaque. I’ve won some other awards, but I’ve never met the (Solomon R.) Guggenheim.”

Dungy completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University in 1995, and earned her Master’s of Fine Arts and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greenesboro in 1997. Through books like “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden,” and “Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History,” Dungy’s lifework has explored the intersections of ecology, environmentalism, motherhood and race.

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Those junctures were important in illustrating the world as she experienced it.

Dungy has four collections of poetry including “Trophic Cascade,” a winner of the Colorado Book Award. She edited “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry,” the first anthology that brought African American environmental poetry to national attention, and is poetry editor for Orion magazine.

Tisa Bryant, University of Iowa associate professor of English, said Dungy was deserving not just for her “deeply felt” work as a poet, but as a person. With a vulnerability that fosters engagement, Dungy immerses readers by including them in “the flora and fauna in the world.”

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And at the intersection of Black identity and her relationship with nature, Bryant says the author pushes back on prevalent urban stereotypes.

“She’s helping us ask and answer difficult but necessary questions about how we move through the world and make note of our creative practices alongside living practices and responsibilities,” Bryant said. “She’s helped us to reconfigure how we think about nature and our way of communing with it — that it’s not just for the elite, the wealthy, people who have time, but that our everyday is exampling our relationships with how we feel and what we see in the world.”

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To Dungy, being a literary citizen means being a builder of institutions — places where the power of relationships are amplified.

“It’s an exponential set of actions, not just focused on the individual, but on creating communities,” she said.

Through some of the anthologies she has edited, she’s proud of helping to reframe ideas about American environmental literature that have had exciting ripple effects.

“I think it wasn’t OK that a whole group of writers doing important work weren’t being seen,” she said. “I wanted to help them be seen.”

On Thursday, she was seen.

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She follows 12 other winners of the prize including James Alan McPherson, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction writing; Roxane Gay, author of New York Times bestselling essay collection “Bad Feminist”; and Toi Derricotte, winner of the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.

This year’s art awarded to Dungy represents the state of Iowa through a topographical work made from a walnut tree branch in Iowa.

“In the wood cut that I made, I like the way that the higher areas are darker wood like Iowa's once plentiful topsoil,” said Mike Sneller, artist for M.C. Ginsberg. “Growing out of the center of Iowa is my interpretation of a Columbine flower like the one seen on the cover of her most recent book ‘Soil.’ The flower is made out of brass, copper and silver.”

For more information about the Paul Engle Prize and past winners, visit iowacityofliterature.org/paul-engle-day.

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.