Professor Bennett Featured in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine

Professor of English and Creative Writing Joshua Bennett was featured in the latest issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Professor Bennett, who won both a Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Award this past April, is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022). He is currently completing Spoken Word: A Cultural History for Knopf, a book of narrative nonfiction.

The feature discusses Professor Bennett's work, as well as his background in spoken word performances. Read an excerpt from the feature below:

"A line, an idea, or an image usually helps Bennett start a poem. Lately he's been using paint color cards—those strips of color samples you find in hardware stores—as writing prompts, playing with evocative paint color names such as Ginger Jar, Ever Blooming, Venom, Monologue, and Moxie. His collections typically take shape once he can find 'the obsession or center point,' as he calls it. His third book of poetry, The Study of Human Life, which Penguin is releasing next year, starts with the idea of trash and disposability—of objects, people, even poems. 'It's much more experimental than anything I've done before,' he says, 'and much more ambitious.'"

Read the full feature "Brave New Voice" by Nancy Schoeffler on the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine website.