Joshua Bennett is the author of seven books of poetry, criticism and narrative nonfiction, including The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) winner of the National Poetry series and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA ’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which was a winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and adapted for television in partnership with Warner Brothers Studios, and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker.
Dr. Bennett’s research calls upon the methods and critical lexica of black studies, ecological criticism, disability studies, and philosophy of literature. He is currently at work on a trio of new projects. The first, a work of literary theory entitled The Art of Opacity, is concerned with the role of dissemblance in African American literature and life. Turning to the works of Ralph Ellison, Frederick Douglass, June Jordan, Gloria Naylor and others, he argues that opacity is often a form of collective self-preservation: a means through which black culture workers deploy a kind of critical withholding—a commitment that manifests even at the level of the built environment—to protect the people, places, and ideas that made them possible. The second, How To Read Poems (And Write Them Too) is a book-length meditation on the art, architecture, and practice of poems in the American expressive tradition. The third is a biography of the poet, essayist, educator, and architect, June Millicent Jordan. Its title is June Forever: The Life and Work of an American Intellectual.
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. For his creative writing and scholarship, he has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.
Alongside his work as an author and academic, Joshua is the founder and principal of Solon: a design practice specializing in the art of adaptation. He is also founding editor of The Duke Poetry Series: A Duke University Press imprint devoted to the conversation between poetry and literary criticism. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
