The Humanities Center welcomes Joshua Bennett (English, Dartmouth College). Bennett describes the event in the following terms: Bond of Live Things Everywhere is my attempt to use the pit school—a term for spaces that enslaved people dug into the ground to teach one another under the cover of nightfall—as a lens through which to construct a robust genealogy of African American writers devoted to the transmission of what I have elsewhere termed black ecological consciousness. For these authors, black study is not an activity limited to the bounds of formal institutions in any traditional sense. Rather it is rooted, at its very best, in a commitment to care for the Earth. It requires that we go outside, read the skies, and listen to the wisdom of what does not communicate in human speech, but calls out to us in a song as old as the land we share.This presentation will focus on the environmental poetics of Lucille Clifton. Through an engagement with her life and letters, I argue that what often appears to be apocalypticism in her work is also a kind of Afrofuturism, a willingness to take seriously the idea that any apocalypse is also, quite literally, a revelation or opening: one wherein black human beings can improvise a radically divergent way of sharing the planet. Indeed, Clifton’s capacious environmental imagination, I will argue, helps lay the groundwork for a more expansive conception of black study as a form of species thinking, a planetary poetics for the 21st century and beyond.