Poets & Writers Theater

In this ABC News segment, Joshua Bennett talks about how his parents nurtured his interest in African American history leading him to write his new book, The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time (Little, Brown, 2026), which is featured in Page One in the March/April 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I am now at the age where my father calls me brother / when we say goodbye.” In this Voices Underground video, Joshua Bennett reads his poem “America Will Be,” which appears in his collection Owed (Penguin, 2020), for the 2021 Chester County Juneteenth Festival at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. For more from Bennett, read his essay “A Shed Full of Golden Shovels” from our Craft Capsules series.

“So how do you discern a shape for / What is often called g-d.” Kazim Ali reads from his latest collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), in this Academy of American Poets virtual reading and conversation with Joshua Bennett, author of Owed (Penguin Poets, 2020). For more from these poets, read what motivates Ali’s writing in Writers Recommend and about Bennett’s writing process in Ten Questions.

“Say it. / That every day is a toast / to living. An ode to the way we / made resilience an art...” In this lecture for the Chautauqua Institution, Joshua Bennett reads a selection of his poems and meditates on his father’s life and the history of the spoken word tradition. Bennett speaks about his latest poetry collection, Owed (Penguin Poets, 2020), in an installment of Ten Questions.

“Forgive me. My heart is an endless elegy. My heart is the ash every house of God leaves behind.” Joshua Bennett, author of the poetry collection, The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), reads a poem for “Black Joy,” an event presented by AfroPunk and the Strivers Row in New York.