Tigermedia - Fighting Off the Weight of Nonexistence: author Claudia Rankine on Citizen: An American Lyric
Fighting Off the Weight of Nonexistence: author Claudia Rankine on Citizen: An American Lyric
Date: March 23rd, 2022
Duration:
1h:40m:6s
In this event, Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric, discusses how Black people endure racism and microaggressions in various facets of their lives and the institutions they navigate. This special event was a part of Queensborough Community College’s (QCC) 2022 Common Read program - a series of cross-disciplinary events in support of a campus-wide, shared reading of a selected text.
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 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) 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 (FENCE, 2015). 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.
The event was organized by the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) in partnership with the Common Read Committee, and was cosponsored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning – all a part of Queensborough Community College-CUNY. For more information about the KHC, please visit: https://khc.qcc.cuny.edu