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West x Midwest: Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown
Free
Spend an evening with McArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown and as they discuss Just Us, Rankine’s brilliant new collection. This arrangement of essays, poems, and images, speaks to the mechanics of race in this country, and invites us to discover what it takes to build better futures.
To view this event, go to: https://www.pdxbookfest.org/daily-live-stream/
If you have not done so already, you will need to register for a free account at pdxbookfest.org so you are able to access all of our free Portland Book Festival events, including this one. You only need to register once to have access to all free festival events.
This event is presented BY WEST x MIDWEST, A COLLABORATION BETWEEN Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, The Loft’s Wordplay, and Wisconsin Book Festival.
“In this genre-defying work, [Claudia Rankine], as she did so effectively in Citizen, combines poetry, essay, visuals, scholarship, analysis, invective, and argument into a passionate and persuasive case about many of the complex mechanics of race in this country…Rankine writes with disarming intimacy and searing honesty…A work that should move, challenge, and transform every reader who encounters it.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Purchase Just Us | The Tradition
All books purchased through festival events, FROM Annie Bloom’s Books, Broadway Books, Green Bean Books, or Powell’s Books, support the authors and publishers who share their work at the festival and the booksellers who have worked hard to keep their businesses open during these difficult times. by purchasing books from festival booksellers you are supporting the sustainability of the festival.
Claudia Rankine
Purchase Just Us from Broadway Books, one of our Portland-based, independent bookstore partners HERE.
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is poetry editor at The Believer magazine and the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
