University Distinguished Professor Dungy is a nationally celebrated poet and professor of English.

Her 2017 debut prose collection of personal essays, “Guidebook to Relative Strangers,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her poetry collection “Trophic Cascade” won the 2018 Colorado Book Award for poetry; both books were finalists for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her poetry collection, Suck on the Marrow, won the American Book Award.

In 2019 she Dungy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and contributed to the New York Times’ 1619 Project. She read an original poem during the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention.

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.

She was the editor of “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.”

Dungy earned her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 1997.