Praised by Publishers Weekly as a “thought-provoking response to a broken world” and Booklist as “a remarkable, soul stirring work.”
ALOUD is thrilled to present the celebrated poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine with her new work Triage. Rankine has expanded contemporary literature through her consciousness-raising, genre-defying writing. In her first book since the much-lauded American trilogy, Rankine presents full-color visuals, shifting into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant work yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters—the narrator and the theorist— self-identified sisters struggling to understand their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives.
Featured Author:
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of eight books, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP which premiered at The Shed in NYC. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of National Book Critics Circle Award, Forward Prize, LA Times Book Award, the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, DAAD, The American Academy in Rome, The American Academy in Berlin, and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, her first collection of poetry. The book was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and it was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Literary Hub named it one of the best books of the last twenty years. Her second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. She is also the coauthor, with Kevin Young, of Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, Lewis holds a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California, an MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a BA in post-colonial literature and creative writing from Hampshire College. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently a professor of poetry and poetics at USC.
