The People Can Fly, by Joshua Bennett

The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time

by former Junior Fellow Joshua Bennett (2016 - 19)

What does it mean to be deemed promising in an unjust world? The award-winning poet and MIT Distinguished Chair of the Humanities interrogates this question—and offers a more expansive vision of giftedness—in this hybrid work of memoir and cultural history.

Published February 3, 2026 by Little, Brown and Company.