About Amanda
I’m Amanda Bennett, Ph.D., a writer, public humanist, cultural strategist, and the first Black woman to serve as Carrboro Poet Laureate. My work begins with a question: How do we close the distance between the values we say we hold and the ways we show up in the world?
I write, gather people, design programs, and move resources toward communities whose brilliance has too often gone unsupported.
Across poetry, public humanities, and cultural strategy, I am building the conditions Black life deserves: beauty, belonging, resources, and room to become.
The most important act of creation is designing pathways for emerging artists to develop, share, and archive their work.
THE THROUGHLINE
This Life Is the Work
Poetry, organizing, scholarship, and public life have always belonged to the same practice.
Long before I had the language of public humanities, I understood that culture is something people make together. As a young organizer, I learned that ideas only become meaningful when they change how we gather, care for one another, and move resources.
That understanding followed me into poetry and scholarship. At Duke, I earned my Ph.D. studying Black feminist traditions of storytelling as a technology of self-repair and communal memory-keeping. Beyond the university, I began making the forms I wanted to encounter in the world: publications, workshops, salons, festivals, community archives, and spaces where Black artists could be witnessed in the fullness of their work.
Today, those threads live together. My writing shapes the questions I bring to public life. My organizing keeps my scholarship accountable to the people it names. My cultural strategy helps artists and organizations turn their deepest values into structures that can hold real lives.
I am not interested in separating art from the conditions that allow art to exist. Like the Black feminist world-builders who came before me, I am interested in building the whole ecosystem.