The College of Arts & Letters and MSU Broad Museum are 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 six volumes of poetry, three 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 7 pm. Register here for the ZOOM webinar link.
You can also watch this event on Facebook Live or YouTubeLive.
Check out our 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.
About the Signature Lecture Series
Originally founded as the Celebrity Lecture Series in 1998 by the College of Arts & Letters and the Dean’s Community Council, the series was later renamed the Signature Lecture Series in 20017 and allows notable public figures to interact and engage with the faculty, students, and greater community of Michigan State University through conversations and discussions.
The popularity of this series has attracted some of the most illustrious scholars, critics, novelists, poets, film producers, and creative artists of our time, including Soledad O’Brien, Ken Burns, Oliver Stone, Richard Ford, and Maya Angelou, just to name a few.
Sponsors of the Signature Lecture Series are the following:
- College of Arts & Letters
- Broad Art Museum
- MSU Libraries
- Department of English
- Creative Writing Program
- Film Studies Program
- Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
This event is being held in collaboration with the MSU Broad Art Museum Artist’s 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 February 8-December 26, 2020.