Claudia Rankine & Jericho Brown
About the Event
West X Midwest at Portland Book Festival
Spend an evening with MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown and as they discuss Just Us, Rankine’s brilliant new collection. This arrangement of essays, poems, and images, speaks to the mechanics of race in this country, and invites us to discover what it takes to build better futures.
This is a free, virtual event, and will be live streamed. Link to Portland Book Festival streaming site coming soon; check back here in October 2020 for more information about how to register.
THIS EVENT IS PRESENTED BY WEST X MIDWEST, A COLLABORATION BETWEEN BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE, LITERARY ARTS, THE LOFT’S WORDPLAY, AND WISCONSIN BOOK FESTIVAL.
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Just Us completes her groundbreaking trilogy, following Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Forward Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Rankine is the author of The White Card, a play; three previous books of poetry, Nothing in Nature Is Private, The End of the Alphabet, and Plot; and coeditor of the anthology The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine cofounded the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), “committed to the activation of interdisciplinary work and a democratized exploration of race in our lives.” She is a MacArthur Fellow and the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale.
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is poetry editor at The Believer magazine and the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.