THE PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING AT THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS INVITES CLAUDIA RANKINE AS THE INAUGURAL SPEAKER FOR THE MFA LECTURE SERIES

We are honored to welcome Claudia Rankine, award-winning author and acclaimed voice in contemporary literature, as the inaugural speaker for the newly launched MFA in Creative Writing  at The American University of Paris.

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 collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020 and her most recent project TRIAGE is forthcoming with them in 2026. 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. She lives in New York.

This event will be followed by a reception.