A More Perfect Union

An Evening with Claudia Rankine (virtual)

What do we expect from our fellow citizens? How do our identities shape the ways we are perceived as citizens? What are our obligations to each other as members of society? We invite you to join New Hampshire Humanities and poet and scholar Claudia Rankine as we explore these questions in the keynote lecture in our A “Good” Citizen series. Rankine, a New York Times bestselling poet and MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, will explore what it means to be a “good” citizen today, at a moment when the rights and responsibilities of citizens are not universally understood or shared. This series was made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

About the presenter

Claudia 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, which premiered in 2020, and The White Card, which premiered in 2018; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published in 2020, and she is the co-editor of The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute. 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. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in 2021. She lives in New Haven, CT.


Interested in these topics?

Want to learn more? Host a Perspectives book group and receive free copies of Claudia Rankine's books, Citizen: An American Lyric or Just Us: An American Conversation. Learn more