Joshua Bennett is the author of eight books of poetry, criticism, narrative nonfiction, and children’s literature, 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 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, 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 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.
