Black Pastoral

Winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets L enore Marshall Poetry Prize Finalist 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize Black Pastoral explores the complex duality of Black peoples’ past and present relationship with nature. It surveys the ways in which our histories (both Black histories and natural/ecological histories), our suffering and our thriving, are forever wound around one another. They are painful at times and act as a salve at others. Ariana Benson’s poems meditate u