Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. A Friends Fund Publication.

From reviews of the first edition "The journey . . . is really through Archie Carr's mind, where it is easy to move from Africa to Florida or Central America, or from mechanical dredges to prehistoric monsters. The result is always interesting because Mr. Carr has a rare ability to look at the world freshly."--Marston Bates, New York Times "The sights to which he calls our attention . . . the mile-high mushroom swarms of kungu flies of Lake Nyasa, the buzzards' ready manipulation of whirlwinds . . . are merely the chords from which, with the toughness of science and the insight of art, he improvises a brilliant opera of speculations about the evolution of animal adaptive behavior."--The New Yorker In the timeless voice of a classic, Ulendo speaks to readers today with even more force and elegance than it did on its first publication in 1954. Written by Florida's preeminent nature writer, this memoir describes the African journey--the "ulendo," as they say in Malawi--of Archie Carr, who spent several summers in Africa on official business to study animal-borne diseases and sea turtle habitats. His secret aim, he wrote, was "to see my dream of Africa unfold." Revealed here in images of pythons, fly spouts, and curious men, his dream became a passion to preserve the African wilderness. "I had thought of Africa as inexhaustible," he wrote in the preface. "Now, however, I am not able to get rid of the thought of its waning. It comes repeatedly into the Ulendo story, and has modified somewhat the tone of blithe irresponsibility I was aiming for." Every few days during his trips he wrote letters to his wife and five children at home in Florida, and these personal asides, full of devotion to his family and enthusiasm for his adventure, are published for the first time in this new paperback edition. "Of course it was a lonely summer," Marjorie Carr writes in her prologue to the 1952 correspondence. "Archie's letters, written on little thin airmail stationery, were anxiously awaited and read and reread." With the reappearance of this collector's treasure, a new generation has the opportunity to experience the adventures and passions of this eloquent naturalist. Archie Carr, Jr. (1909-87), world-renowned sea turtle expert, was the University of Florida's first graduate research professor. Among his many books are The Windward Road (UPF, 1979), High Jungles and Low (UPF, 1992), So Excellent a Fishe, and several volumes for the Life Nature Library. In addition to countless awards for scientific work, Carr received the O. Henry Memorial Award, the John Burroughs Medal, and the first Hal Borland Award of the National Audubon Society for his writing.

Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit is a testament both to the wonderful strangeness of the human species and to the surprising sympathies that bind us all.

Winner of the inaugural Theodore Roosevelt Association Book Prize A captivating account of how Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong passion for the natural world set the stage for America’s wildlife conservation movement and determined his legacy as a founding father of today’s museum naturalism. No U.S. president is more popularly associated with nature and wildlife than is Theodore Roosevelt—prodigious hunter, tireless adventurer, and ardent conservationist. We think of him as a larger-than-life original, yet in The Naturalist, Darrin Lunde has firmly situated Roosevelt’s indomitable curiosity about the natural world in the tradition of museum naturalism. As a child, Roosevelt actively modeled himself on the men (including John James Audubon and Spencer F. Baird) who pioneered this key branch of biology by developing a taxonomy of the natural world—basing their work on the experiential study of nature. The impact that these scientists and their trailblazing methods had on Roosevelt shaped not only his audacious personality but his entire career, informing his work as a statesman and ultimately affecting generations of Americans’ relationship to this country’s wilderness. Drawing on Roosevelt’s diaries and travel journals as well as Lunde’s own role as a leading figure in museum naturalism today, The Naturalist reads Roosevelt through the lens of his love for nature. From his teenage collections of birds and small mammals to his time at Harvard and political rise, Roosevelt’s fascination with wildlife and exploration culminated in his triumphant expedition to Africa, a trip which he himself considered to be the apex of his varied life. With narrative verve, Lunde brings his singular experience to bear on our twenty-sixth president’s life and constructs a perceptively researched and insightful history that tracks Roosevelt’s maturation from exuberant boyhood hunter to vital champion of serious scientific inquiry.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls “the dream of Black Studies”—abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.

"Big Game and Pygmies" is the fascinating account of Cuthbert Christy's experiences in the Central African forests in search of a tribe called the Okapi. Cuthbert Christy (1863 - 1932) was a British zoologist and doctor who embarked on many explorations of Central Africa in the early 20th century. He is also well known due to his extensive work on sleeping sickness. This volume primarily deals with his last and longest expedition into the Ituri Forest region of the Congo on behalf of the Belgian Government. Contents include: "The Ituri Forest", "The Ituri Forest (continued)", "The Equatorial Belt", "The Ituri Pygmies", "The Ituri Pygmies (continued)", "The Okapi", "The Okapi (continued)", "The African Elephant", "The African Elephant (continued)", "The African Elephant (continued)", "The African Elephant (continued)", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with the original artwork and text.