Hickory – In honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs will host poet Joshua Bennett in P.E. Monroe Auditorium at 10am on Monday, 
January 21. At 11am, immediately following the program, the Hickory NAACP will lead a march through Hickory from the LRU campus to the Ridgeview community. Bennett will return that evening at 7pm in Belk Centrum as part of LRU’s Visiting Writers Series, which is sponsored by Hickory Public Library.
Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016). He holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
In 2010, Dr. Bennett delivered the Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with the distinctions of Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He has traveled internationally as a performance artist and has recited his original work at the Sundance Film Festival, The NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word at the White House.
Winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, Dr. Bennett has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, and the Ford Foundation.
Photo: Joshua Bennett
