Dr. Joshua Bennett is Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and Professor of Literature at MIT. He is the author of seven books, including Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker; The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series.
Dr. Bennett earned his PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has recited his original work at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, Madison Square Garden, and President 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, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Alongside his work as an author and educator, Bennett is the founding editor of the Duke Poetry Series and the founder and principal of Solon: a design studio specializing in the art of adaptation. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
