Celebrated writer Claudia Rankine '93 returned to Columbia University School of the Arts for the first of a new series of events, Speak Now, organized by Dean and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Sarah Cole.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.
Speak Now is a new speaker series at Columbia University School of the Arts. Speak Now features artists whose work reaches a broad public and embodies the spirit of adventurous creativity that is the hallmark of the School of the Arts.
This event was part of the Dialogue Across Difference initiative of the Office of the Provost of Columbia University.
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