Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020); and Owed (Penguin Books, 2020). Bennett has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.