A&T, Bluford Library to Present “An Evening with Joshua Bennett” on April 11

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (March 14, 2024) – North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and its F.D. Bluford Library will present “An Evening with Joshua Bennett”on Thursday, April 11, at 7 p.m. in McNair Auditorium, Room 240.

The event will feature Bennett, a renowned author, artist and professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT, along with Aggie Poet Laureate Essence Connor-Barringer. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Bennett has written five acclaimed books of poetry, criticism and narrative nonfiction, most recently Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023). The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022) won the Paterson Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award, and is being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios. Owed (Penguin, 2020) was a finalist for the New England Book Award, Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) won the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) won the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. 

Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. 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 former President Barack 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.

For his creative writing and scholarship, Bennett has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Alongside his friend and colleague, Jesse McCarthy, he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the Black expressive tradition.

Connor-Barringer, who holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from N.C. A&T, is an M.A. student in English and African American literature from Charlotte, North Carolina. She serves as a writing consultant in the University Writing Center and has published two books of poetry, Maple Sunrise and An Ochre Road.

This is event is made possible through a collaboration between Bluford Library and Greensboro Bound, with generous support from the A&T Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.