Penn announced that 2010 College graduate and award-winning poet Joshua Bennett will address the Class of 2023 at the College of Arts and Sciences graduation ceremony on May 14.
As an undergraduate at Penn, Bennett majored in English and Africana Studies. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
Bennett’s work of poetry and literary criticism include The Sobbing School, winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; Being Property Once Myself, winner of the Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize; and Owed.
Bennett has earned fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.
Bennett will be accompanied by College and Wharton senior Hoang Le.
Le is a QuestBridge Scholar from Davie, Fla. As a Life Sciences and Management program dual-degree student, he is majoring in biology in the College and in economics at Wharton.
Le was a 2021-2022 winner of the Y-prize competition at Penn for a pitch surrounding orthopedic needle technology. He also served as editor-in-chief of the undergraduate medical journal Synapse, and developed a Pipeline Program in partnership with the Netter Center for West Philly high school students interested in the LSM program.
After graduation, Le plans to pursue a Ph.D. in systems and synthetic biology at Columbia University.
"Healthcare should be a universal human right — but it's increasingly become a privilege reserved for the few. My experiences with health inequity are unfortunately commonplace throughout the world, a fact which drives me to explore, innovate, and hope — so I can engineer humanity back into healthcare," Le told the Millennium Fellowship.
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