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Notice of Public Meeting: Kalamazoo Public Library Board of Trustees | July 27 | 5:30 pm | Central Library/Van Deusen Room. The packet of information for the meeting can be found on the library’s website. 

Book

The people can fly : American promise, Black prodigies, and the greatest miracle of all time

Call Number

  • 973.0496 B4718 (CEN, POW)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2026.

Physical Description

x, 261 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Summary

"What does it mean to be deemed promising in an unjust world? Award-winning poet and MIT professor Dr. Joshua Bennett interrogates this question--and offers a more expansive vision of giftedness==in this striking, original work. What does promise cost in America? Especially when that promise is seen as grounds to separate us from the communities we cherish, and framed as the key to success, salvation, survival? In The People Can Fly, Dr. Joshua Bennett explores the complex position of Black prodigies in a society that has, all too often, defined blackness as absence, as a lack of inner life. Through this hybrid work of memoir and cultural history, Dr. Bennett shares how his own academic journey reflected the ebb and flow of being seen as both promising and as a problem. He turns to the childhood archives of Malcolm X, Stevie Wonder, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, and others to further explore this theme: highlighting the role of cultural institutions, and loving communities, in shaping the lives of leading lights within African American culture. What's more, Dr. Bennett clarifies how these spaces--these mentors, teachers, friends, and kin--helped defend young people from a world that sought to exclude them from its vision of promise and possibility."--

Contents

  • Introduction: What a gift is
  • Malcolm and me
  • The height of light
  • Nevertheless, live
  • Park Hill interlude
  • Auto-bibliography
  • James Baldwin interlude
  • A land where we never grow old
  • The heart is one of the only parts of the body that has its own sign
  • Oscar's interlude
  • The orbit of our dreaming
  • On imagination; or, Notes toward a theory of miracles.

Subjects