Just Us: An American Conversation

How do we talk about race in America? Two of our country’s most award-winning poets and unflinching voices on racism will join ALOUD for their first public event together. Claudia Rankine is an artistic innovator, Yale professor, and MacArthur fellow. Her previous groundbreaking book, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Rankine’s newest book, Just Us: An American Conversation, invites readers to engage with what is said and not said about whiteness, privilege, prejudice, and bias as our public and private lives intersect. Terrance Hayes’s most recent award-winning book, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, was written in response to the first two hundred days of Trump’s presidency. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur fellowship, a Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, and a National Book Award. In a broad-minded program moderated by acclaimed poet and essayist Dawn Lundy Martin, Rankine and Hayes will examine the act of reckoning with our past and present. Join us for a powerful exchange about how we might open pathways, bridge silences, share truths, and progress through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.
Co-presented with Blue Flower Arts and the Academy of American Poets