Poet and playwright Claudia Rankine will give a talk titled “The Creative Imagination and Race,” followed by a Q&A and a book signing on Tuesday, October 6, from 1-2 pm in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre. She is the author of five collections of poetry, a play, and numerous video collaborations, and she is the editor of several anthologies. Her subjects include some of the most relevant and troubling social themes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Rankine’s critically acclaimed book Citizen: An American Lyric uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images to explore what it means to be an American in a “post-racial” society. Citizen was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, and was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014. A finalist for the National Book Award, Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.