Purchase College Presents Claudia Rankine on the Racial Imaginary Institute

Purchase College-SUNY will feature best-selling poet Claudia Rankine unveiling her new Racial Imaginary Institute on Thurs., February 2, 2017, at 4:30 p.m. The program, which is complimentary and open to the public, will take place in the Humanities Lecture Hall at Purchase College (735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, NY). The event is part of the Durst Distinguished Lecture Series, which brings preeminent writers to the Westchester community.

Poet Claudia Rankine was recently named a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and recipient of the highly prestigious MacArthur “genius grant.” She is Purchase College’s 2016-17 Roy and Shirley Durst Distinguished Chair in Literature.

In this presentation, Claudia Rankine will discuss the impetus behind and the ideas surrounding the Racial Imaginary Institute, a space and framework she has created in collaboration with Beth Loffreda and Casey Llewellyn.

The Racial Imaginary Institute is dedicated to fostering art and writing that investigates, questions, and re-invents the racial imaginaries of our current moment. The name “racial imaginary” is meant to capture the enduring paradoxical truth of race: it is an invented concept that nevertheless operates with extraordinary force in our daily lives.

"I was thrilled to learn this fall that Claudia Rankine had received a MacArthur ‘genius grant’—it's hard to imagine anyone more deserving. I'm equally thrilled to learn how she will be using her funds,” says Anthony Domestico, assistant professor of literature at Purchase College. “The Racial Imaginary Institute will do important work, and we at Purchase are eager to hear what this work might look like."

The author of five collections of poetry, Claudia Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Her most recent book, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), won, among many other awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the NAACP Image Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry.

For more information, please visit www.purchase.edu or call 914.251.6550.

The Durst Distinguished Lecture Series and the Roy and Shirley Durst Distinguished Chair in Literature are funded by the Roy and Shirley Durst Distinguished Chair in Literature Endowment. The mission of the Durst programs is to infuse the experience and intellect of leading writers into the Purchase community, while providing diverse opportunities for these writers to interact with students and influence campus life.