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05/04/2022 09:20 AMThe Guilford Free Library will host a forum on Wednesday, May 11 to explore the issues of race and inequality that shape our history and world. The event is sponsored by The Writing Injustice Book Group and will feature Claudia Rankine, a New York Times bestselling poet and MacArthur Genius Award recipient.
According to Programming Librarian Laurette Lyons, Rankine will to discuss her latest work on racial discourse in the United States, Just Us: An American Conversation. The book is a series of reflections on Rankine’s encounters with Whiteness as it manifests in friends, therapists, students, and passersby, according to the facilitator of the event Hazel V. Carby. (Carby is the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Yale University, and Donna Daniels Ph.D., Vice President, Heron Foundation and Cultural Anthropologist.)
According to The Writing Injustice Book Group, which began in 2018, the group is inviting the Guilford community to explore the issues of race and inequality that shape our history and our world. The group states that its members “seek to enrich the civic life of Guilford by introducing the community to the literary, poetic, and visual heritage of literature, art, and film that engages complex questions of racial injustice in the past and present, subjects regrettably absent from the education and culture of this overwhelmingly White town.”
Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP and The White Card. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published in 2020. 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 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.
According to Writing Injustice Group, “As everyday White supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of Whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.”
The 2021-’22 Writing Injustice Series is sponsored by Guilford Foundation. Copies of Just Us: An American Conversation will be available for sale at the event through Breakwater Books. This program is free and open to all. To register, call the library at 203-453-8282 or visit www.guilfordfreelibrary.org.