What does it mean to live in a racialized society that refuses to name itself as such?
Poet, playwright, and cultural critic Claudia Rankine joins us for a conversation on race, visibility, and the emotional landscape of American life. Her landmark book Citizen: An American Lyric fused poetry, essay, and visual image to capture the intimacies and aggressions of everyday racism —becoming one of the most talked-about and taught books of the last decade. Her follow-up, Just Us: An American Conversation, continues that interrogation through essays, dialogues, and reflections on whiteness, privilege, and accountability.
Rankine’s work resists easy categorization. Whether writing for the stage, publishing in literary journals, or founding The Racial Imaginary Institute, she creates spaces for difficult and necessary conversations around power, visibility, and the structures that shape our lives.
This conversation will explore the evolving role of the artist as a public intellectual, and the ways in which she continues to expand what literature can do in our time.