The People Can Fly American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time

By: Joshua Bennett

Published by Little Brown, 2026-02-03

Award-winning poet and MIT Distinguished Chair of the Humanities Dr. Joshua Bennett combines personal narrative and history to offer a new, more expansive vision of giftedness.



What does it mean--or cost--to be deemed promising in America? Especially when that promise is seen as grounds to separate us from the communities we cherish, and is framed as the key to success, salvation, and survival in an unfair world? 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 lack of intellect or 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 both as promising and as a problem. He turns to the 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--and 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.



With stunning prose and grace, The People Can Fly is an urgent reflection on what it means to be gifted, and to give one's gifts away, in the present day. It is a praise song for generations of black dreamers who dared to imagine another world--where ascension is only the beginning.



"Joshua Bennett's astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable."

--Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Free the Captives