Hayes spent the better part of the 200 days between Trump’s election and the early summer of 2017 writing sonnets, 70 of which make up this collection.

Bennett is the author of two collections of poetry, The Sobbing School (2016) and Owed (2020), and a book of literary criticism titled B eing Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (2020).To say that Terrance Hayes’s latest collection, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin (2018), is about Donald Trump’s election is to both identify a vital thread in these poems and to miss the point entirely. He has made appearances to perform his work at the White House for President Barack Obama, the Sundance Film Festival, and at the NAACP Image Awards, where he was a finalist for his poetry. His personal writing and poetry pulls from his knowledge of African American history and literary tradition and explores topics of race and class, with his experiences navigating being a Black student in a majority white high school and a Black professor in a historically white industry also holding much relevance in his writing. Bennett’s academic research focus is broad and covers topics such as African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, Black poetics, and environmental studies. Bennett was a junior fellow at Harvard University and a visiting lecturer at schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pittsburgh before becoming a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth University, where he currently works. from the University of Warwick that he earned as a Marshall scholar in the U.K., and an MA and PhD in English from Princeton University.

Bennett’s impressive academic resume is made up of a dual BA in English and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (where he graduated magna cum laude), a Theatre Performance Studies M. He would spend four hours every school day commuting on the bus and train–time he would spend reading, nurturing his growing passion for literature. Bennett’s academic performance in middle school earned him a scholarship to a choice private high school, where he was one of very few Black students. Joshua Bennett is an American writer and professor born in Yonkers, New York.

Being property once myself