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Ariana Benson’s debut poetry collection Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize Award. A southern Black ecopoet, Benson’s work has received fellowships & awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Furious Flower, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and others. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students.

All readings are free and open to the public!