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Claudia Rankine to deliver Ellmann Lectures at Emory

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Award-winning poet and essayist Claudia Rankine will deliver the next series of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University Nov. 7-9, 2019.

Award-winning poet and essayist Claudia Rankine will deliver the next series of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University Nov. 7-9, 2019. 

Tickets to the lectures will be available to the public beginning Wednesday, Oct. 2, at the Emory Box Office in the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, by phone at 404-727-5050 or online at tickets.arts.emory.edu. Tickets are free, but are limited to two per person, per event.

Rankine will deliver two lectures, titled “A History of Olympia's Maid in Contemporary Poetry” on Nov. 7, and “Poets Engaged with Nationalism, Borders and Belonging” on Nov. 8. A reading and book signing will follow on Nov. 9.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”; two plays, including “The White Card,” which premiered in 2018 and was published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and “Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue,” as well as numerous video collaborations.

Rankine’s next publication, “Just Us,” is a collection of essays forthcoming with Graywolf Press in 2020. She also is the editor of several anthologies including “The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.” In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute, which is committed to the activation of interdisciplinary work and a democratized exploration of race in our lives. 

Among her numerous awards and honors are 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.

Rankine is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Conn. 

The Ellmann Lectures, one of America’s most prestigious literary lecture series, have brought to Emory a distinguished sequence of international authors, including A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, Margaret Atwood, Paul Simon and Colm Tóibín.


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