{"id":4568,"date":"2018-07-31T15:35:47","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T19:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc-draft\/?p=4568"},"modified":"2020-02-26T11:09:05","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T16:09:05","slug":"20181009-claudiarankine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/2018-event\/20181009-claudiarankine\/","title":{"rendered":"Contemporary Black Women Artists: Intertextuality and Counter-Narratives"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Claudia Rankine<\/h2>\n<p>Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author&nbsp;of five collections of poetry including&nbsp;<em>Citizen: An American Lyric<\/em>&nbsp;and<em>&nbsp;Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>; two plays including&nbsp;<em>Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue<\/em>; and is the editor of several anthologies including&nbsp;<em>The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind<\/em>. She also co-produces a video series, \u201cThe Situation,\u201d alongside John Lucas, and is the founder of the&nbsp;<em>Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination<\/em>. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets &amp; Writers\u2019 Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.<\/p>\n<h3>Watch the video<\/h3>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"520\" height=\"340\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"auto\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/myvideo.uri.edu\/Mediasite\/Play\/c8dafa1f37c5440e95726bb1fec500051d\" class=\"iframe-class\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Rankine\u2019s bestselling book,&nbsp;<em>Citizen: An American Lyric<\/em>&nbsp;(Graywolf, 2014), uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images, to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a \u201cpost-racial\u201d society. A defining text for our time,<em>&nbsp;Citizen<\/em>&nbsp;was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award\u2019s history to be a double nominee),&nbsp;the NAACP Image Award,&nbsp;the&nbsp;PEN Open Book Award,&nbsp;and the LA Times Book Award for poetry.&nbsp;<em>Citizen<\/em>&nbsp;was&nbsp;nominated for the Hurston\/Wright 2015 Legacy Award, was&nbsp;a&nbsp;finalist for the 2014 National Book Award,&nbsp;and&nbsp;was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014, who stated: \u201cThis collection examines everyday encounters with racism in the second person, forcing the reader\u2014regardless of identity\u2014to engage a narrative haunted by the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride.\u201d&nbsp;<em>Citizen<\/em>&nbsp;also&nbsp;holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.<\/p>\n<p>In all of her work, whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Rankine\u2019s voice is one of unrelenting candor, and her poetry is some of the most innovative and thoughtful work to emerge in recent years. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. In the words of the Judges Citation for the Jackson Prize: \u201cThe moral vision of Claudia Rankine\u2019s poetry is astounding. In a body of work that pushes the boundaries of the contemporary lyric, Rankine has managed to make space for meditation and vigorous debate upon some of the most relevant and troubling social themes of the 20th and 21st centuries\u2026.These poems do the work of art of the highest order\u2014teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Her other poetry collections are&nbsp;<em>Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>&nbsp;(2008); the award-winning&nbsp;<em>Nothing in Nature is Private<\/em>;&nbsp;<em>The End of the Alphabet<\/em>; and&nbsp;<em>Plot<\/em>, wherein she welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque.&nbsp;<em>Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>\u2014a multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and image\u2014is an experimental and deeply personal exploration of the condition of fragmented selfhood in contemporary America. Rankine is also the author of the play,&nbsp;<em>Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue<\/em>, which is performed on a bus ride through the Bronx. The New York Times calls it an \u201cengrossing urban adventure, which does not conform to the standard formula for theater but does make the bustle outside the bus throb with history, mystery and meaning, as the best live performances do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rankine co-edited the anthology&nbsp;<em>American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language<\/em>, and her work is included in several anthologies, including&nbsp;<em>Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Best American Poetry 2001<\/em>,<em>&nbsp;Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century<\/em>, and&nbsp;<em>The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry<\/em>. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project Newsletter.<\/p>\n<p>Rankine is also the playwright for&nbsp;<em>The White Card<\/em>,&nbsp;a meticulously crafted story, which raises uncomfortable questions about what is \u2014 and who are \u2014 on display. Exploring contemporary headlines and cultural touchstones, Claudia Rankine\u2019s&nbsp;<em>The White Card<\/em>&nbsp;unpacks the insidious ways in which racism manifests itself in everyday situations and questions how our society can can progress if whiteness stays invisible.<\/p>\n<p>She&nbsp;lives in&nbsp;New York City and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><b>Claudia Rankine<\/b><br \/>October 9, 2018<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1667,"featured_media":4571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2018-event"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1667"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4568"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6336,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4568\/revisions\/6336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/hc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}