Our Place Among The Infinities: The Art & Science of Poems Master ClassIn-Person
Wednesday, Jun 03, 2026
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Our partner, 416 Kent Ave, is hosting this event.
Where does the warmth of poetry meet the advances and demands of our technological age? From the invention of writing to the advent of the typewriter and the rise of the personal computer as collaborator, authors have attempted to address this question. Twentieth-century poets across a wide aesthetic range—Robert Frost, Sun Ra, X. J. Kennedy, Nikki Giovanni—asked us to consider “our place among the infinities,” as Frost once put it: the link between our timeless yearning for the stars and the scientific leaps that brought them closer. Once you know where to look, the overlap is astonishing. This workshop will feature poets who bring the arts and sciences into direct and meaningful conversation. In studying their work and crafting our own poems in dialogue with their insights, we will pursue a working synthesis of these ancient pursuits: a poetics made to the measure of the cosmos.
POETRY, ELA, STEAM
Joshua Bennett
Joshua Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and a professor of literature at MIT. He earned his PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA in theatre and performance studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, the UK, and South Africa. Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is the author of seven books, including Spoken Word: A Cultural History, The Study of Human Life, and The Sobbing School. His most recent work of nonfiction is The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and The Greatest Miracle of All Time. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.