27 Aug BABEL: Claudia Rankine Categories: Official JB Events Timelines: 2: BABEL Archive, Just Buffalo History (2010s)
Where:
Kleinhans Symphony Hall
3 Symphony Circle
Buffalo, NY 14201
Date: October 23, 2015
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Patron VIP Reception: 7:00 p.m.
Photos by Bruce Jackson of Claudia Rankine at Kleinhans Music Hall (October 23, 2015)
About the Author
CLAUDIA RANKINE is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first book ever to be nominated in two categories; and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as well as the plays, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre; and Existing Conditions, co-authored with Casey Llewellyn. Rankine is co-editor of the American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century series with Wesleyan University Press and The Racial Imaginary with Fence Books. A recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, she is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.
About the Book
In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia 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: An American Lyric is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
