Claudia Rankine recognized as MacArthur Fellow

Claudia Rankine, poet and author of The University of Arizona Honors College’s 2016-17 Common Reading, Citizen is one of 23 people who have been selected as a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and awarded the MacArthur “genius grant.”

The grant comes with a $625,000 stipend that is distributed during a five year period and is meant for awardees “to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.

The MacArthur Fellows Program encourages talented individuals “to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations… Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields.”

Notable past MacArthur Fellows include writers Cormac McCarthy and George Saunders and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky. According to The MacArthur Foundation, 942 people have been named MacArthur Fellows since 1981.

Rankine, a professor at Yale University, is a poet, author, and playwright. According to The Guardian, she began working on Citizen “as a response to events happening in American culture.” Rankine told The Guardian that she “recorded all of the CNN coverage and was fascinated by how racism coloured the reporting. After that, [she] began to respond to events that caught the public imagination – mostly things like police shooting of unarmed black men and other pieces of blatant injustice that clearly were tied to racism.”

Each year, Honors students take a one unit seminar course, HNRS 295, and select a book for the following year’s Honors Common Reading which is read by first year Honors students and integrated into first year courses by Honors faculty. Honors students in last year’s course selected Rankine’s Citizen because of its importance to American society today.

“It’s the message and opportunity for reflection that will have the greatest impact on students in their first year experience,” says Cheree Meeks, UA Honors College's director of First Year Experience. “We are tying themes from the book in the classroom with discussion and reflections, but also throughout programming beyond the classroom. The first year experience is intended to infuse themes from the book and our overall theme, Identities and Interactions, throughout the experience.”

Winner of the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, the 2015 PEN Open Book Award, the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and the Poets and Writers' Jackson Poetry Prize, Citizen holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to land on the New York Times Bestseller list in the non-fiction category.

According to the National Book Award judges, Citizen combines prose, poetry, and images to investigate “the ways in which racism pervades daily American social and cultural life, rendering certain of its citizens politically invisible. Rankine's formally inventive book challenges our notion that citizenship is only a legal designation that the state determines by expanding that definition to include a larger understanding of civic belonging and identity, built out of cross-racial empathy, communal responsibility, and a deeply shared commitment to equality."

Rankine will use the grant to found a “’Racial Imaginary Institute,’ which would enable creative thinkers ‘to come together in a kind of laboratory environment to talk about the making of art and culture and … the dismantling of white dominance,’” according to The Guardian.

“The book addresses something that is currently front and center in the news – police brutality and frequent assaults on Black lives and Black bodies,” says Meeks. “I hope that the book will encourage students to reflect on their own experiences and how they can be part of the solution, rather than the problem.”