11/26/2025
Audiobook Recording this week at Cybersound with Dr. Joshua Bennett. The award-winning poet and MIT Distinguished Chair of the Humanities interrogates this question—and offers a more expansive vision of giftedness—in this striking, original work.
“The People Can Fly will levitate your mind and enrich your soul." —Lena Waithe
In The People Can Fly, Dr. Joshua Bennett explores the complex position of black prodigies in a society that has, all too often, defined blackness as absence, as lack of intellect or inner life.
He turns to the childhood archives of Malcolm X, Stevie Wonder, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, and others to further explore this theme: highlighting the role of cultural institutions, and loving communities, in shaping the lives of leading lights within African American culture.