Current Perspectives: Ariana Benson

Join us at the Kansas City Art Institute for a lecture by Ariana Benson. Benson is a southern Black poet-storyteller. Her debut poetry collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry.

This event is free and open to the public.

A southern Black ecopoet and storyteller, Benson has received various fellowships & awards including a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and others. Benson serves as the Assistant Director of the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program at Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Header Image: Black Pastoral (cover image), University of Georgia Press, 2023