Intended Audience
Thursday, September 12: Poet Ariana Benson (7:30, Daugherty-Palmer Commons)
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Prize and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Benson Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. and also holds Masters of Arts degrees in both Poetic Practice and Scriptwriting, which she earned as a Marshall Scholar. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.