Camille T. Dungy, celebrated for both her poetry and her genre-bending nonfiction, returns to verse in 2026 with America, A Love Story, a fifth collection that turns a searching, ambivalent gaze on the country its title invokes.
Published by Wesleyan University Press in March 2026, the collection arrives after Dungy's acclaimed memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, which broadened her audience beyond poetry circles. The new book channels that expanded reach back into the concentrated form where she first made her name.
Love as a complicated verb
The collection's title carries a deliberate edge. To love America, Dungy suggests, is to love something that has not always loved you back. Her poems hold affection and grievance in the same breath, examining belonging, history and the labor of care in a nation defined by contradiction.
From soil to citizenship
Dungy's recent nonfiction dwelt on gardening, ecology and Black motherhood, and those concerns carry into her verse. The natural world remains a lens through which she reads history, tending and cultivation becoming metaphors for the ongoing work of building a livable country.
- Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, March 2026
- Milestone: Dungy's fifth full-length poetry collection
- Context: follows her memoir Soil
- Themes: nationhood, ecology, motherhood and belonging
A poet of range
Dungy has long moved between forms, editing anthologies, writing essays and publishing poetry that engages environment and race with equal rigor. America, A Love Story consolidates those interests, using the intimacy of the lyric to address subjects usually reserved for argument.
Poetry's political moment
The collection lands amid renewed public appetite for poetry that grapples directly with the state of the nation. Rather than offering easy consolation or blunt protest, Dungy's approach favors nuance, insisting that genuine love includes honest reckoning.
For readers following contemporary American poetry, America, A Love Story is among the year's essential collections. It showcases a writer at the height of her powers, capable of holding tenderness and critique in perfect tension, and it makes a persuasive case that the love poem and the political poem need not be separate things at all.
A wider readership for poetry
Dungy's crossover success with Soil has positioned her to bring new readers to verse, a form that too often struggles for attention outside academic and specialist circles. Those arriving from her nonfiction will find a poet whose concerns are continuous across genres: the same attentiveness to land, family and history animates both her essays and her lines. By publishing with a respected university press while writing for a broad audience, Dungy models a way for serious poetry to reach beyond its usual borders. America, A Love Story is likely to feature prominently in year-end conversations about the collections that mattered most in 2026.