Bennett describes Owed as “a book about reparation, … the long-standing fight in African American culture for physical reparations from the government, … but also reparation as a cultural practice. He has two more books coming out in 2020, Owed and Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. … I actually have maybe three very distinct careers that are all happening at the same time,” he said.Īs his own role model, Bennett published his first poetry book, Algorithm and Blues in 2014, and his second book, The Sobbing School in 2016. “I don’t really know of many people that are sort of poets publishing books, poets that perform, and then people that are literary critics. In this field, Bennett had to become his own role model, not only professionally, but in the life he’s living as a whole. “It’s been a real blessing, and that’s been the journey of my life,” he said. Since his performance at the White House in 2009, Bennett has been touring across the world - that’s 10 years of impacting people with his words. “We’re a complex people that have always went across genre, across time, and we supported each other and kept each other afloat.”īennett, an NAACP Image Award nominee and current assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, will close out Week Five, “The Life of the Spoken Word,” at 10:45 a.m. “I knew since I was very young that I just believed in the power of both my writing and performance, and those two things are separate, but necessarily connected,” Bennett said.

Bennett recalled coming home from church, and re-creating sermons on a regular basis. That’s what Joshua Bennett does, and has been doing since the age of 4, if you let his mom tell the story. But it also takes a special kind of person to use words as a platform to help others and spread knowledge. It takes a special kind of person to be able to create poetry, to entice listeners and have them wrapped up in every word.

Being property once myself