Juneteenth Dialogues

"The Land Speaks B(l)ack"

Ariana Benson

Ariana Benson (she/they), a southern Black poet born in Norfolk, Virginia, will be reading from their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023), which won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Benson has received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Porter House Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Benson is the winner of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.