We: A Reading by Joshua Bennett

(from Pitt Events calendar)

Join us as Dr. Bennett shares poems from his recent collections, Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), as well as newer work from a manuscript in progress.

Joy Priest is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Poetry in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA Writing Program and and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice (CCPP) at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP). She will join Joshua Bennett to introduce him and his work to our community.

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), which was named one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2023; The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.

Dr. Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.

For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Alongside his friend and colleague, Jesse McCarthy, he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the black expressive tradition. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.