“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.” Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is one of the most important contemporary creative writers and scholars on questions of race and identity. A poet, essayist and playwright. Published in September, Just Us completes her ground-breaking American Lyric trilogy, following Don't Let Me Be Lonely and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Citizen. In Citizen, Rankine explains that the racial imaginary is concerned not with who has the right to write about race but, rather, with where the desire comes from, and how to detect when race is “taking up residence in the creative act.” Just Us focuses on dialogue, honest self-reflection, and the willingness to be wrong. Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as her guiding light, Rankine explores a series of everyday micro-aggressions with friends and strangers in spaces like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth. Her unique hybrid prose-poetry style, described by the Guardian as “writing on the hard shoulder of prose” confronts those real encounters and clashes we need to resolve in art as much as in life.

In conversation with Caelainn Hogan, journalist, and author of Republic of Shame.

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