New Speaker Dr. Joshua Bennett’s Black Poetics as Re-imagination and Political Justice

For centuries, as a society, we have debated the relationship between politics and art. The line has long been blurred, widened, and, in some cases, erased all together. While political activism has largely been characterized by the determined will and monumental efforts of community-organizers, strategic planners, and outspoken politicians, the creative imagination of the artist has an unmistakable role in everyday politics and global social change.

Esteemed American novelist, the late Toni Morrison, said, “All of that art-for-art’s sake is BS…I’m not interested in art that is not in the world…The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”

Award-winning poet, interrogative scholar, and new Outspoken speaker, Dr. Joshua Bennett, has long taken Morrison at her word. From a spoken-word youth in the middle-school cafeteria of the South Bronx to slam champion of HBO’s hit poetry slam series, Brave New Voices, to Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, Joshua has committed himself to the business of black writing as a means of radical re-imagination and repair.

In his three books, The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, and Owed (Penguin, 2020), scholarship, politics, criticism and black poetics converge to present an all-encompassing vision of blackness that was, is, and is to come. Whether through challenging cultural critique or rich poetry, his writing ultimately attempts to do the work of justice, mercy, love, and reconciliation. He is undeniably conjuring “irrevocably beautiful” and “unquestionably political” art. Art we have undoubtedly needed in times past and need even more in the uncertain times to come. He, along with the organizers, planners, and activists of our time, are ushering us forward.

Joshua has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Clinton Global Citizen Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Joshua is now available to book for virtual events and speaking engagements in 2021. Reach out to us by email for more information.