Born: 1997 (circa), United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Endowment for the Arts. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Her debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2024 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
IW note: Infinite Women respects gender identity, including non-binary and gender non-conforming identities. This person’s inclusion on IW is not intended to erase these identities, but rather to include anyone who has lived experience presenting as, and thus being treated as, female and who does not explicitly self-identify as male. IW values inclusion over exclusion and wishes to recognize as many different people and groups as we reasonably can.