MSU Signature Lecture Series with Claudia Rankine
The MSU College of Arts & Letters is pleased to announce the Fall 2020 Signature Lecture with Claudia Rankine—poet, essayist, playwright, and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays, and various essays.
Her book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award; the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the first book in the award’s history to be nominated in both poetry and criticism; the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; the 2015 NAACP Image Award in poetry; the 2015 PEN Open Book Award; the 2015 PEN American Center USA Literary Award; the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award; and the 2015 VIDA Literary Award. Citizen was also a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. It is the only poetry book to be a New York Times Bestseller in the nonfiction category.
This online event will begin at 7pm. Register here for the Zoom webinar link.
Check out the College of Arts & Letters' pop-up online independent book store partner, Literati Bookstore, to order copies of Claudia Rankine’s books and find other social justice and anti-racism texts.
This event is being held in collaboration with the MSU Broad's Artist Project Series John Lucas and Claudia Rankine: Situations exhibition. The MSU Broad presents, for the first time in a solo exhibition, the entire series of Situation videos collaboratively produced by documentary filmmaker John Lucas and poet Claudia Rankine since 2008. The videos address the vexed notion of a post-racial United States (a term coined in the Obama era to assert that the election of an African American president indicated the achievement of racial equality) by foregrounding the public and private experiences of Black Americans. The exhibition is on view February 8 – December 26, 2020.
