Writers’ Worktable: Poets on Research and Fellowships

Poet/Scholars Joshua Bennett (Owed, Penguin 2020) and Bettina Judd (patient., Black Lawrence Press, 2014) speak with Cave Canem’s Poetry Coalition Fellow Christopher J. Greggs about applying to fellowships and developing poetry projects that require in-depth research.

Joshua Bennett 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: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020); and Owed (Penguin, 2020). His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2021. Dr. Bennett has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth.

Bettina Judd is the author of patient. (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), which engages the legacy of medical experimentation on Black women in the United States. An Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, she lives between the Pacific Northwest and Maryland.