In association with Festival of Ideas and the Centre for Black Humanities

Award-winning poet, writer and thinker Claudia Rankine delivers the 2020 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading. Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship and author of five poetry collections, Professor Rankine will read from her new publication, Just Us: An American Conversation (published in the UK by Allen Lane) and be in conversation with Vanessa Kisuule, Bristol’s City Poet from 2018-2020. Just Us is Claudia Rankine’s most intimate work yet, questioning what it means now to interrogate white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and what she calls the alarming move towards Brexit.

This event has been organised in partnership with the  Bristol Poetry Institute, Festival of Ideas and Centre for Black Humanities. It is part of the A Poetic City season of events commemorating 250 years since the death of Bristol-born poet Thomas Chatterton and The Festival of Ideas Great Reset programme looking at the solutions to the challenges we face (which runs October 2020-October 2021).

Thanks to support from University of Bristol there is no charge for this event.

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) which was published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her new publication, Just Us: An American Conversation, is a collection of essays with Graywolf Press (US) and Allen Lane (UK) 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.

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. Her poetry collections Joyriding The Storm  and A Recipe For Sorcery are both published by Burning Eye and her work was Highly Commended in The Forward Prize Anthology 2019. Her one woman show SEXY toured with the support of Arts Council England, Bristol Old Vic and Camden People’s Theatre. She was the Bristol City Poet 2018-2020.

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Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading: Claudia Rankine. In association with Festival of Ideas and the Centre for Black Humanities