Poets & Writers Theater

“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.