Research at AAS

Suck on the Marrow

Set in Virginia and Philadelphia during the mid-19th century, Suck on the Marrow (2010, Red Hen Press) traces the experiences of self-emancipated bondswomen, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, free people of color, and the slaves of a large plantation and small household. The interconnected narratives of six fictionalized characters use traceable dates, facts, and locations to investigate moving aspects of American history. These poems explore the interdependence between plantation life and life in Northern and Southern American cities, and the connections between the successes and struggles of a wide range of Americans, free and slave, black and white, Northern and Southern.

About the Fellow

Camille Dungy is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. She is the author of four collections of poetry including Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press: 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton &Co: 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. In 2021 she held the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and in 2019 she had a Guggenheim Fellowship. Dungy is the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise, which explores the materials used by artists to amplify what they reveal about art, history, and humanity. Her latest book Soil describes her seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden located in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado.