LEWISTON — Camille Dungy, an award-winning environmental poet and editor of the first anthology of nature poetry by African-American writers, will present the Otis Lecture at Bates College on Thursday, Oct. 6.

The 7:30 p.m. lecture in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., is free, but tickets are required. Call 786-6135 or email olinarts@bates.edu. Unclaimed reservations will be released that day at 7:15 p.m.

A reception and book signing will follow the lecture.

Dungy, an associate professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, writes about the widening gaps in nature’s fabric. Most people in the world are people of color, and most people of color live in damaged environments, she told Inkspot blogger Maisha Johnson. “If we as people of color aren’t globally conscious of environmental degradation, we are wreaking havoc on lots of brown people.”

Writing, she said, is “a really good way to get people conscious of that.”

Dungy is the author of the award-winning “Smith Blue,” a collection of poems that explore, with fury and tenderness, the countless ways in which people invite and suffer from catastrophe. Her other collections are “Suck on the Marrow,” a fictional gallery of former slaves and free blacks, particularly women, that won the 2011 American Book Award; and her 2006 debut, “What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison.”

Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the master’s in fine arts program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She edited “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry,” the first anthology of nature poetry by African-American writers.

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