Benjamin Krusling

Student Fellow

Benjamin Krusling is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently developing a project that examines changes in U.S. political economy in the 1980s alongside changing gestures in African American expressive cultures, with a particular focus on struggles over narrative, genre, class, and the aesthetic quality of writerliness across music, poetry, and cinema. In addition to his research, Benjamin is a writer and artist and the author of two books of poetry — Fear of God Essentials, his latest, is forthcoming in Spring 2027 from Nightboat Books. He holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has taught literature and creative writing at the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.