Poetry Reading: Cleopatra Mathis and Joshua Bennett

Please join the English and Creative Writing Department on April 1 at 4:45 pm for the Cleopatra Mathis Poetry & Prose Series featuring Cleopatra Mathis and Joshua Bennett.

The English and Creative Writing Department invites you to join us for a poetry reading with Professor Emerita Cleopatra Mathis and Assistant Professor Joshua Bennett. The reading will take place on Zoom - please email english.department@dartmouth.edu for the link.

Cleopatra Mathis has published eight books of poems, most recently After the Body and Book of Dog (Sarabande). She is the receipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry. The founder of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College, she lives in Vermont.

Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of four books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020) and The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022). He 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.

Joshua has recited his original works at venues such as 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. 

Joshua's writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.