Join us in conversation with acclaimed poet and playwright Claudia Rankine and Queens College professor and author Maaza Mengiste.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/American Repertory Theater) was published with Graywolf Press 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her newest publication, Just Us: An American Conversation, is a collection of essays published with Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of 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, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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OFF THE PAGE: Conversations with Writers is a Queens College series produced by Kupferberg Center for the Arts, the Department of English, the Provost’s Office, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. Curated by QC professor and author Vanessa Pérez-Rosario.

This event with Claudia Rankine is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

This event is a Marjorie Hecht Watson Memorial Reading, a series of readings in memory of Marjorie Hecht Watson (B.A. 1964), who developed a lifelong passion for literature by attending literary readings here at Queens College. After teaching English at the university level for 10 years, Marjorie received a law degree and went on to a career at the National Labor Relations Board, where, as a supervisory attorney in the Division of Advice, she used her own analysis and writing skills to insure uniform application of Federal labor law throughout the United States.