JOSHUA BENNETT

he / him / his PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING

In late November, a dozen students in poet Joshua Bennett’s class on nature writing read their poems for an audience of family and friends. Other than having shared their work in the intimacy of their writing workshop, some had never recited their poetry in public.

“The reason I wasn’t as nervous as I could have been is that Professor Bennett gives off the aura that your words are valued and that he wants to hear what you have to say,” recalled Hollin Hakimian ’23, a psychology major who performed two poems. “He celebrates you and how you want to present your experience.”

Bennett, 34, has won prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, which recognizes “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form,” and a Whiting Award, “given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.”

“His poetry is piercingly intelligent,” the Whiting judges said. “There is so much yearning and emotion alongside a mesmerizing musical craft.”

But Bennett understands what it is to be nervous even terrified. When he was 11, his mother insisted that he get on stage to recite one of his poems at a slam at the local public library in Yonkers, New York. “She told me that gifts were meant to be shared,” he said. By the time he was in college, he was competing in up to 40 poetry slams a year around the country, and in May 2009, at age 20, he performed at the White House. “I realize now that doing the thing that scares you, over and over, can be worthwhile.”

The soft-spoken poet has a passion for pushing the power of language into surprising new realms. He recently curated The Bond of Live Things Everywhere, an open-air poetry and soundscape installation at the New York Botanical Garden that explored the connection between Black dreams of freedom and stewardship of the Earth. He roots his compelling poems in the cadences and dramatic delivery of spoken-word performances. That fiercely competitive world is the topic of his upcoming book Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which Knopf is releasing this spring, as well as the focus of his new podcast Say It Loud

And “The Book of Mycah,” a powerful, surreal poem that evolved into a longer novella at the center of Bennett’s latest poetry collection, The Study of Human Life, is being adapted into a television project for Warner Brothers with Bennett as co-executive producer. In it, Malcolm X and Mycah Dudley, a teenage boy slain at a neighborhood block party, are resurrected from the dead, a half-century apart.

“I needed to figure out who all these characters are and what their commitments and obsessions were,” he says. “I’d never written anything like this. I wanted to keep the intensity of the poetic language, and to reflect it in the way these people described their witnessing of these miraculous events.”

Nancy Schoeffler

Nancy Schoeffler is Executive Editor of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. This profile is adapted, in part, from an article she originally published in DAM in 2021.