Q&A "...When you’re urban or even in a space like a suburban neighborhood you can understand or feel where your world ends, right?... The field to me has presented a place of expanse. Freedom."
Q&A with Ariana Benson, author of Black Pastoral
Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, BLACK PASTORAL (University of Georgia Press, 2023), won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. 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 is a proud alumna of Spelman College, and also holds Master of Arts degrees in both poetic practice and scriptwriting, which she earned as a Marshall Scholar. Their poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, 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.
Author image from the video titled, "Furious Flower Syllabus: Interview with Ariana Benson," published online January 16, 2024.
