Guidebook to Relative Strangers

“Camille Dungy has crafted an elegant, meditative love letter to the life of the writer, the natural world, histories from which we cannot nor should not extricate ourselves, black womanhood, black motherhood, and the unabashed joy of raising up a black girl. Dungy maps the ways her world has changed its shape as she has learned to mother her daughter, while also negotiating the writing life she cannot abandon. The writing here is as intimate as it is expansive.” - ROXANE GAY, author of Difficult Women

“I’m so impressed by the calm, lucidity, and sturdiness of Camille Dungy’s writing, even as it explores the most agonizing and anxiety-producing aspects of our shared past and present. I say 'shared,' but these burdens are of course unevenly distributed; Dungy’s account stares down the effects of such with clear eyes, full heart, and the kind of dedication to fact, feeling, and history that we truly need now, as ever.” —MAGGIE NELSON, author of The Argonauts

“For Dungy, history is a shared root system that nourishes her vital imagination. GUIDEBOOK TO RELATIVE STRANGERS is a balm for the American soul.”—GREGORY PARDLO, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Digest