Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, performer, educator and scholar Dr. Joshua Bennett about writing a poem for a friend’s wedding, the relationship between performance and page, growing up in South Yonkers and attending a largely white private school, the birth of Black Studies, creating alternative gathering and learning spaces, infiltrating established institutions, the June Jordan fellowship at Columbia’s Center for Justice, the writers and thinkers who inspire Bennett, and how to write about family and living people with respect and honesty.
EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 34Books by Joshua BennettThe Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)
Videos of JoshuaSpoken Wordsmith: Joshua Bennett, via Reebok
16 Bars for Kendrick Lamar, via The Strivers Row
Performing at the White House Poetry Jam
Other Books/Writers Mentioned in the EpisodeAchille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017)
Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” (Bloomsbury, 2012)
Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art (Triquarterly, 2017)
June Jordan’s Civil Wars (Touchstone, 1995)
Cornel West’s Race Matters (Vintage, 1994)
Theodor Adorno
Richard Wright
Toni Morrison
Zora Neale Hurston
James Baldwin
Jupiter Hammon
George Jackson
Lucille Clifton
Aja Mone
Carlos Andres Gomez
Elizabeth Acevedo
Tyehimba Jess
Phillis Wheatley
Ed Roberson
Dr. Jamall Calloway
Jason Craige Harris
Other Relevant LinksJoshua’s dissertation: “Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of the Animal in 20th Century African American Literature”
Joshua interviewed in Dissent Magazine
Kendrick Lamar
Sam Cook
June Jordan Fellowship at the Center for Justice at Columbia University
The Strivers Row
Michael J. Dumas
Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival
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