Joshua Bennett, PhD, is a prize-winning poet and spoken word artist. He gained critical acclaim in 2016 with The Sobbing School, winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Bennett’s follow-ups, Owed (2020) and The Study of Human Life (2022), solidified his standing as one of his generation’s most resonant and needed poetic voices. In a starred review for Owed, Publisher’s Weekly raves “these powerful, crisp poems celebrate the complexity, joy, and heartbreak of the Black experience in America.” Bennett’s newest release is Spoken Word: A Cultural History. In it, he tracks the origins and broad impact of a resilient art form that has long centered voices and experiences outside the dominant cultural narrative. In addition to his writing, Bennett is a professor at Dartmouth College and founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to the rediscovery of underappreciated Black poets from the 19th and 20th centuries.

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