Joshua Bennett

Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities at MIT. He is the author of five books: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023; The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and The Massachusetts Book Award; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. 

Bennett earned his PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA 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 UK and South Africa. 

For his creative writing and scholarship, Bennett has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the Black expressive tradition, as well as Life Studies, an MIT Press book series that celebrates the bond between poetic practice and literary criticism. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.