“Rankine’s
voice shimmers with wisdom and fury.” —The Telegraph
Poet Claudia Rankine will visit Hendrix College as the 2017
Murphy Visiting Poet on November 2, 2017. That evening, she will read from and
discuss her work at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall. This event is free and open to the public and will be followed by
a reception and book signing in Trieschmann Gallery.
Claudia
Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry: including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays;
numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies
including The Racial Imaginary: Writers
on Race in the Life of the Mind.
For Citizen, Rankine won the Forward Prize
for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was also nominated in the
criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a
double nominee), the Los Angeles Times
Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for
the National Book Award, Citizen also
holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the
nonfiction category.
Among
her other numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt
National Prize for Poetry, 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.
Currently,
she is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale
University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
The
Murphy Visiting Poet Series has included such nationally and internationally
recognized poets as Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert
Pinsky, Rita Dove, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Michael Ondaatje,
Carolyn Forché, and Kevin Young.
This event is sponsored by the
Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, which are
designed to enhance and enrich the study and teaching of literature and
language at Hendrix College. For more information about this and future events,
please contact Henryetta Vanaman, 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.