Joshua Bennett, Distinguished Speaker

On Feb. 4, poet and professor Joshua Bennett visited with students and faculty in the Upper School, followed by an evening event for parents and our whole community. Bennett read some of his poems, spoke about his process and took questions from the audience.

A professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities at MIT, Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, as well as Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022) and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023).

"Reading and writing deeply − it’s a superpower," Bennett told students and teachers. "It keeps you strong and agile in a world that is shifting under our feet." He noted that after navigating the corporate landscape, he discovered that "poetry is one of the best things I could give the world."

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 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 U.K. and South Africa.