Rowan to welcome writer Claudia Rankine for President’s Lecture Series presentation

New York Times bestselling poet and National Book Award finalist Claudia Rankine, whose work resonates with unrelenting candor as she addresses some of the nation’s most relevant and troubling social themes, will speak at Rowan University on Thursday, Feb. 11, as part of the President’s Lecture Series.

Rankine will read from her works during her presentation, which begins at 7 p.m. in the Eynon Ballroom of the Chamberlain Student Center, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro. The reading, which will be followed by a book signing, is free and open to the public.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays and is editor of several anthologies. Citizen: An American Lyric, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism and visual images to explore what it means to be an African-American citizen in the United States today. Citizen won the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (where it also was a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the NAACP image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry.

The book also was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014 and was nominated for the Hurston/Wright 2015 Legacy Award. In honoring Citizen, which holds the distinction of being the only poetry book on the New York Times’ bestseller list for non-fiction, NPR noted, “This collection examines everyday encounters with racism in the second person, forcing the reader—regardless of identity—to engage a narrative haunted by the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride.”

Rankine’s other poetry collections include Don't Let Me Be Lonely; the award-wining Nothing in Nature is Private; The End of the Alphabet; and Plot. Her play, "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue," which is performed on a bus ride through the Bronx, was described by The New York Times as an “engrossing urban adventure, which does not conform to the standard formula for theater but does make the bustle outside the bus throb with history, mystery and meaning, as the best live performances do.”

Recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation  and the National Endowment for the Arts, Rankine co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Her work is included in several anthologies and has been published in numerous journals, including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project Newsletter.

A resident of California, where she holds the Aerol Arnold Chair in the English Department at the University of Southern California, Rankine co-produces a video series, “The Situation,” with John Lucas. She is the founder of the “Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination.”

The President’s Lecture Series brings prominent speakers to Rowan University for talks on topics ranging from education and science to history and politics. Past speakers have included, among others, Cornel West, Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Kozol, Scott Sagan, Sergei Khrushchev, and Dan Rather.