We the People of the United States…Establish Justice
with Claudia Rankine & Yesenia Montilla
Booking and details
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Dates Tues, Oct 15, 2024 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The 56th season of the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series opens with Claudia Rankine (Citizen, An American Lyric) and Yesenia Montilla (Muse Found in a Colonized Body) reading from work that explores whether “we, the people” have truly established justice for all. Poet and speechwriter Camonghne Felix will moderate a conversation with both poets after the reading.
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“Claudia Rankine is revelatory for me, as a white American, about pain points that are woven into the fabric of the American everyday. She models how it’s possible to bring this out into the open, not in order to fight but in order to draw closer. She shows how we can all do this hour by hour, encounter by encounter, in ordinary times and spaces.” –Krista Tippet
“Her work illuminates the emotional and psychic tensions that mark the experiences of many living in twenty-first-century America.” —MacArthur Citation
About the poets
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). 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 Fall 2021.
Yesenia Montilla
Yesenia Montilla is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 and 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body published by Four Way Books in 2022 was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
Selected works
Works by Claudia Rankine
Works by Yesenia Montilla