Episode 103. Ariana Benson reveals the importance of storytelling through poetry, memory, and nature while giving thanks to Black institutions that have developed her voice.

Ariana Benson is a poet-storyteller from Chesapeake, Virginia. She holds a BA in Psychology from Spelman College, where she graduated as Valedictorian, and an MA in Poetic Practice from Royal Holloway, University of London, where she studied as a 2019 Marshall Scholar. She was a finalist in the 2019 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and received the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found in ANOMALY, Lunch Ticket, Southern Humanities Review and Auburn Avenue, where she serves as Nonfiction Editor, and are forthcoming in Shenandoah and an upcoming Diode Editions Anthology. Through her poems, she strives to fashion a tapestry of Blackness that stitches together histories and memories across space and time, speaking to the infinite richness and depth of our existence.