Héctor Tobar in Conversation with Oscar Villalon

Joshua Bennett is joined in conversation with Tongo Eisen Martin, Jesse McCarthy, and Simone White to discuss his new book "Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man" published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. The prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by Josiah Luis Alderete. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School, winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and MIT and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017) and someone's dead already (Boostrap Press, 2015) and his poetry has been featured in Harper's Magazine and New York Times Magazine. Heaven Is All Goobyes was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also a movement worker and educator whose work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and his curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, "We Charge Genocide Again!" has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He's from San Francisco. Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research is concerned with the intersection between politics and aesthetics in African American literature, postwar or post-45 literary history, and Black Studies. His dissertation The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, 1945 – 1965 argues for a reinterpretation of black literary aesthetics in the early Cold War and for the value of a discrete periodization of that era. He is also interested in modernism, film, poetics and translation. While a graduate student at Princeton he founded a Digital Humanities project based on the Sylvia Beach archives held at Princeton's Firestone Library called Mapping Expatriate Paris. His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. He also serves as an editor at The Point. Simone White is the author of Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, and House Envy of All the World and of the poetry chapbooks Unrest and, with Kim Thomas, Dolly. Her writing has appeared in publications including Arttforum, BOMB, e-flux journal, the Chicago Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.