Hi there. I'm Melissa Adwarnie, and you're listening to NPR's book of the day.

What and Who is brilliant. That's one of the central questions in the book The People Can Fly,

a memoir and cultural history written by MIT professor and author Joshua Bennett. In it,

he explores the stories of black prodigies. Bennett talked with NPR's Michelle Martin about how becoming a father planted the seed for the book.

What is the relationship between promise and perception?

What does it mean to be a virtuoso when nobody expects anything of you at all?

And what if what we recognize as gifted is often more about what we can

monetize or measure than about what might truly make a difference in the world? Those are just

some of the complicated questions the poet and writer Joshua Bennett asks in his latest book,

The People Can Fly. In it, Bennett, a professor at MIT, weaves together folklore, history,

and memoir to sort through what it

means to be a prodigy, especially a black prodigy, such as Phyllis Wheatley, Stevie Wonder, and

himself. And he is with us now. Professor Bennett, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Michelle. How'd you get interested in this? Was it your own story of being

understood to be really gifted at a really young age and then going to schools and sometimes people acting like you're dumb and you couldn't even do basic work, which obviously turned out not to be true? How did you get interested in this?

Some of it had to do with becoming a father in 2020. I felt like I needed a radically different

vision of education for my son than the one I'd had for myself. So from the time I was very young,

my mother instilled this idea in me that when I went to school, I was always on the defensive

end of things, right? That school was sort of an elaborate labyrinth, and I had to

navigate teachers' perceptions of me. There was also this idea that I was representative of the race

in a certain way. So in becoming a father, who's raising my children in a very different sort of

context in suburban Massachusetts, not in the Bronx and in South Yonkers, and having very different

...