Award-winning poet Claudia Rankine will be speaking at CWRU on Thursday, January 24 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, from 10:30 – 11:30 AM.

Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. A provocative meditation on race, Citizen recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. The book was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and has won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, L.A. Times Book Prize and PEN Open Book Award.

Rankine is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She is also the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

Rankine will be joined at this event by Center for Arts-Inspired Learning’s Board Member, Michael Bowen. Michael was selected by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson in September 2017 to be the Campaign Director for the mayor during his run for an unprecedented fourth term in office. Michael took a hiatus from his position as a litigation associate at Taft during the three-month successful campaign which resulted in the mayor’s victory on Nov. 8, 2017. Michael earned his B.A. in history from Miami University and his J.D. from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and is currently a member of the Taft Litigation group. He served as a summer associate at the firm in 2015.

This event is part of Center for Arts-Inspired Learning’s NEA Big Read and is presented in partnership with The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and Cuyahoga County Public Library.

This program is made possible, in part, by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.