The Department of English & Creative Writing Welcomes Prof. Joshua Bennett

Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series winner and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—as well as Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a 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. In 2010, he delivered the Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with the distinctions of Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.

Dr. Bennett has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, the Clinton Global Citizen Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House.

Bennett’s first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

In the spring term of 2019, Professor Bennett will be teaching the course Introduction to African American Environmental Thought: The Black Outdoors (ENGL 53.29).