Professor Joshua Bennett will focus on the environmental poetics of poet and children’s book author Lucille Clifton. Engaging with her life, her, poetry, and her works of literature, Bennett will argue that what appears to be apocalypticism in her work is also a kind of Afrofuturism—a willingness to take seriously the idea that any apocalypse is also, quite literally, an opening to improvise a different way of sharing the planet. Ultimately. Clifton’s capacious environmental imagination helped lay the groundwork for a black ecological consciousness, rooted in a commitment to care for the Earth, for the 21st century and beyond.
For 50 years, New Hampshire Humanities has been connecting people to culture, history, places, ideas, and one another. Each month, Humanities@Home will highlight a topic that NHH addressed during its history that still resonates today. NHH has mounted poetry programs throughout the last 50 years—from Robert Frost’s New Hampshire in the 80s to the Kearsage Poetry festival in 2006. This program looks at the cultural history of spoken word poetry, which encompasses all poetry meant to be performed, instead of read in a book, including slam poetry.
About the Presenter
Joshua Bennett is Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He is the author of five books: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and finalist for an NAACP Image Award, Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which was named winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and is currently being adapted for television in partnership with Warner Brothers Studios, and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
