Lowell Lecture
Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric
Date & Time
March 2, 2022 at 7 p.m.
Location
Virtual
, MA
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Claudia Rankine
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Chandler Shaw (shawcp@bc.edu, )
Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Claudia Rankine will give a reading from Citizen, followed by an audience Q&A. From Rankine’s website: In Citizen, Rankine recounts “mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen interrogates the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.”
Cosponsored by the American Studies Program, the African and African Diaspora Studies Program, the English Department, the History Department, the Sociology Department, the Theatre Department, the PULSE Program, the Creative Writing concentration, Poetry Days, and with the support of an Institute for the Liberal Arts Major Grant Award.
Please note this event is now virtual. Register here: https://bccte.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_p7HN0MGmQm6V26bu_ehoRA