Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson is a poet from Chesapeake, Virginia. She was a finalist in the 2019 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Pink Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in Anomaly, Lunch Ticket, Southern Humanities Review, and Auburn Avenue, where she serves as nonfiction editor, and are forthcoming in Great River Review and an upcoming Diode Editions anthology. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
Reading List
Dear Moses Grandy…Love, the Great Dismal Swamp (1930)
“It was the dense, tangled hostility of the [Great Dismal] swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.” —Smithsonian Magazine, September 2016 “Here, among snakes, bears and panthers… I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly… I then […]