Renowned Poet Claudia Rankine to Visit Campus
April 6, 2022
Unfortunately, Claudia Rankine’s travels to Illinois have been canceled this week,
including her visit to Illinois Wesleyan University on Thursday evening. We anticipate
the event will be rescheduled.
March 28, 2022
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Illinois Wesleyan will host Claudia Rankine, a New York Times best-selling author and co-founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute, for a discussion event at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 7 in the Hansen Student Center.
Following the interaction on campus, Rankine will hold a reading of her most recent work at the Normal Theater at 7 p.m. followed by a reception at Medici restaurant in Normal. The events are free and open to the public.
Additionally, the Illinois Wesleyan English Department is hosting a reading group in preparation for the event which will meet at 4 p.m. on Thursday, March 31 in the Center for Liberal Arts Room 105. The reading list and more information can be found here .
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, three plays and numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays Just Us: An American Conversation , was published by Graywolf Press 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.
“ Claudia Rankine is a poet of the first order who is able to engage both of poetry's power sources, both the rhetorical and the orphic, making poems that speak clearly to aspects of our historical moment – especially all those that necessitate the affirmation that, indeed, Black Lives Matter – but in ways that are aware of how insidious and invasive racist ideologies are and engage those ideologies with combinations of sinewy counter-narratives and insistent song,” said Robert W. Harrington Professor of English Michael Theune.
Through her renowned work, Rankine explores themes of race, economics, and global corporate culture, approaching them through various genres, including poetry, prose and visual art. Theune said Rankine’s event at the Hansen Student Center will be dynamic and interactive, featuring a Q&A session.
Rankine's visit is presented by the William Morgan Distinguished Poet Series. It is co-sponsored by contributions from Illinois State University Emeritus Professor William Morgan as well as several departments and offices at Illinois Wesleyan University and ISU.
“Illinois Wesleyan is at a crucial junction in its own evolution,” said Theune. “Among the many identity-defining projects in which it is involved, the institution is engaged in concerted efforts to make itself an increasingly diverse, equitable and inclusive university. Claudia Rankine's visit here will be a gift in this regard. Rankine has so much to offer, so many insights to share, that I can only imagine that her presence will help in some ways to quicken, enliven and advance these conversations, this work. But let's be clear: Rankine's visit should be understood as, to use the language of advancement, a challenge gift. In itself, it will resolve nothing. The work will remain to be done.”
By Kailee Galloway ’23