Join poet and McArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine for a conversation with Garvia Bailey about her recent work, including Just Us: An American Conversation, which examines silence and guilt, perfectly attuned to this long-overdue moment of racial reckoning

Claudia 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 February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) was published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her essay collection, Just Us: An American Conversation, was released by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also 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 (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. She 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, Connecticut.

Garvia Bailey is a storyteller, broadcaster, host, producer, and co-founder of the on-line radio station, JAZZCAST (jazzcast.ca). She has been an on-air host and producer with the CBC and JazzFM91. She is a sought after moderator, workshop facilitator and interviewer working regularly with Hot Docs, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Toronto Public Library and others. Garvia is a freelance podcast producer and host with Antica Productions and Media Girlfriends Inc. and produces content with the award winning multi-media production company Pop Sandbox. She is a jurist for the prestigious Canadian Hillman Prize for Investigative Journalism and a 2020 co-winner of the Canadian RTNDA award for opinion writing.

Copies of Just Us: An American Conversation are available for sale at Another Story Book Shop.