Dr. Joshua Bennet, “The Bond of Live Things Everywhere”

Thursday, April 13, 7:30-9 p.m., Fenwick Library Reading Room (Room 2001)

Please join us for this year’s Vernon and Marguerite Gras Lecture in the Humanities. This year’s speaker, Dr. Joshua Bennett, is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series winner and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—as well as Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022).

"The Bond of Live Things Everywhere" is inspired by the life and letters of Lucille Clifton as well as "The Clearing"—a green space cut deep in the woods where a free Black community finds grace in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Dr. Bennett collaborated on an installation at the New York Botanical Garden as part of this project and has a forthcoming book with the same title on Black environmental imagination.

Dr. Bennett's talk is part of the Vernon and Marguerite Gras Lecture in the Humanities Series, which has previously hosted writers and thinkers including David Orr, T. Collin Campbell, Fritjob Capra, Jorie Graham, Wendy Wheeler, Robert E. Singleton, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier.

Vernon Gras is a professor emeritus of English and Literature at George Mason University and the founder of the George Mason University Press. Marguerite Gras was a legislative research staffer at the U.S. House of Representatives, 1974–1991.

I hope many of you will be able to attend.  Information about Dr. Joshua Bennett’s lecture on Thursday, April 13 at 7:30 pm in the Fenwick Reading Room is available at https://english.gmu.edu/events/14507.



Tamara Harvey, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

Chair, Department of English

Associate Professor of English

Women and Gender Studies Program Faculty; Cultural Studies Affiliated Faculty

George Mason University

4400 University Dr., MS 3E4

Fairfax, VA 22030

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Office: Horizon Hall 4153

Office phone: (703) 993-1192



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