Our latest installment features the poem In Defense of Henry Box Brown written and read by Joshua Bennett.
Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He is the author of three books of poetry and criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
Dr. Bennett’s writing has been published in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He 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.
About Henry “Box” Brown- Henry “Box” Brown was born into slavery in Virginia in 1815. In 1849 he mailed himself to freedom inside a wooden create marked “dry goods.” Henry “Box” Brown would go on to perform the story of his escape for theatre audiences around the country as well as in England and Canada.
About Poetry & Play- Nationally acclaimed poets bring their theatre-related poetry to Central New York via the new online series from Syracuse Stage, Poetry & Play.
The online video series is an extension of an existing live performance series that paired poets and poetry with similarly themed Syracuse Stage plays. The move to presenting the series online is part of Syracuse Stage’s response to the closure of theaters due to Covid-19. The online version will feature poets and actors self-recording and reading poems written about experiences in the theatre. New installments will appear in your email inbox every other Monday.
