Poet Rankine Visits Campus
2 December 2016 Poet Rankine Visits Campus
Art profoundly changes who we are, said American poet Claudia Rankine.
Rankine gavea reading of her work Citizen: An American Lyric at the Smith Center for the Arts on Wednesday, Nov. 30 at 7:30 p.m. The book is this years common read for the first year experience at HWS and has inspired campus dialogue around issues of race and racism in first-year classrooms and at community events. In anticipation of the reading, a faculty panel discussed Rankines work and a student art exhibition was held in conjunction with her visit.
Published in 2014, Citizen has received critical acclaim and has been widely recognized as a defining text of our time by academics and publishers. The winner of the National Book Awards Critics Circle Award for Poetry and a finalist for the National Book Award in the criticism category, Citizen is the first text to be nominated for both categories, as well as the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.
Rankines reading at the Smith, which alsoincluded a discussion of her work, waspreceded by the student art exhibition From Slave to Citizen. The exhibit focused on themes of resilience, oppression and resistance and was displayed in the Davis Gallery at Houghton House, alongside Into the AfroFuture by Stacey Robinson in the Solarium Gallery. Robinsons work will be on display untilDec. 9. She will also give a lecture on her artat Houghton House on Dec. 1 from 4:45 to 6 p.m.
Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and is the authorof five collections of poetry, two plays, and the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. She also co-produces a video series, The Situation, and is the founder of the Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination. This year, she received the highly selective 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, and has plans to develop The Racial Imaginary Institute in NYC, a cultural laboratory that will deconstruct whiteness.
Her other awards and honors include the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.
On Nov. 15, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature Kathryn Cowles, Assistant Professor of Economics Keoka Grayson, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture Angelique Szymanek led a discussion on Rankines work in the context of American citizenship. The talk was moderated by Associate Professor of English Rob Carson.