A Reading and Discussion with Authors Claudia Rankine and Marlon James

RANKINE and JAMES will read from their works and engage in a conversation that will attempt to connect issues of race, justice, and violence with MTI's 2014-2015 theme.

Claudia Rankine is Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Rankine is the recent recipient of an NAACP Image Award, and the author of five collections of poetry including the National Book Award finalist Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press),which was described by the New Yorker as an "especially vital book for this moment in time," and by the New York Times as "insistently topical, with references to Trayvon Martin and stop-and-frisk police tactics, and concerned with intimate moments when racial impasses spring up between friends and colleagues." Citizen won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and became the only book of poetry to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. 

Born in Jamaica in 1970, MARLON JAMES is a Professor of English at Macalester College in Minnesota and the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Award for Fiction. James is the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was touted by the Wall Street Journal as "a fictional, kaleidoscopic take on the 1976 assassination attempt on reggae star Bob Marley and its aftermath." Publisher's Weekly declared that the novel "should be required reading" and the New York Times calls James a "prodigious talent."