Just Us: An American Conversation

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Just Us: An American Conversation

How do we talk about race in America? Two of our country's most award-winning poets and unflinching voices on racism will join ALOUD for their first public event together. Claudia Rankine is an artistic innovator, Yale professor, and MacArthur fellow. Her previous groundbreaking book, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Rankine’s newest book, Just Us: An American Conversation, invites readers to engage with what is said and not said about whiteness, privilege, prejudice, and bias as our public and private lives intersect. Terrance Hayes’s most recent award-winning book, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, was written in response to the first two hundred days of Trump’s presidency. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur fellowship, a Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, and a National Book Award. In a broad-minded program moderated by acclaimed poet and essayist Dawn Lundy Martin, Rankine and Hayes will examine the act of reckoning with our past and present. Join us for a powerful exchange about how we might open pathways, bridge silences, share truths, and progress through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.
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Claudia Rankine is a poet, artistic innovator, and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Her next publication, Just Us: An American Conversation, is a collection of essays where Rankine questions what it means in these spaces to interrogate white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House and what it means to be an American today.

Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was the winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; Discipline, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of African American Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.