The Graduate School

An Evening with Claudia Rankine

Tues. May 15, 2018      7:30–9 p.m.

Kane Hall 130

Claudia Rankine is the author of five poetry collections, including the PEN Award-winning “Citizen: An American Lyric,” which has the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times nonfiction bestseller.

Admission is free. Advanced registration is required.

This lecture has reached capacity. As a courtesy, the Graduate School will offer standby seating on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 6:45 pm in Kane Hall. Any reserved seats not taken by 7:15 pm will be offered to our guests in the standby line.

Produced in partnership with the University of Washington Graduate School.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry: “Citizen: An American Lyric” (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Book Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry, and the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric” (Graywolf Press, 2004); PLOT (Grove Press, 2001); “The End of the Alphabet” (Grove Press, 1998); and “Nothing in Nature is Private” (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. She has edited numerous anthologies.

In 2013, Rankine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Fellow chancellor Mark Doty praised her selection, saying: “Claudia Rankine’s formally inventive poems investigate many kinds of boundaries: the unsettled territory between poetry and prose, between the word and the visual image, between what it’s like to be a subject and the ways we’re defined from outside by skin color, economics, and global corporate culture. This fearless poet extends American poetry in invigorating new directions.”

Her honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowments for the Arts. In 2005, Rankine was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. In 2016, Rankine was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and named a United States Artists Zell fellow in literature. In 2017, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, a “a moving collaboration with other collectives, spaces, artists, and organizations towards art exhibitions, readings, dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that engage the subject of race.” She is currently a Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.