An Evening with Claudia Rankine & Emily Skillings (via Zoom)

We are thrilled to welcome Claudia Rankine and Emily Skillings to read on Zoom for the Hudson Valley Writers Center. Please join us on Zoom for this very special event! This reading is a fundraiser for HVWC and your support is much appreciated. 

All reading registrants will be entered to win a copy of the readers’ books.
All reading registrants who donate $50 or more will be mailed (domestic US addresses only) a gift on behalf of HVWC and our small press imprint, Slapering Hol Press.

The Zoom link will be sent immediately at the time of registration via email. Please check your spam filter and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; 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 recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. 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 will join the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New Haven, CT.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not and two chapbooks, Backchannel and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants. She is recently the editor of John Ashbery’s posthumous collection of poems Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works. Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, and jubilat. Skillings is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and small press. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017, and has taught creative writing at Yale University, Columbia University School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, Poets House, and through Brooklyn Poets. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

“Her work illuminates the emotional and psychic tensions that mark the experiences of many living in twenty-first-century America.” —MacArthur Citation

“Rankine’s voice shimmers with wisdom and fury.” —The Telegraph

“Claudia Rankine is revelatory for me, as a white American, about pain points that are woven into the fabric of the American everyday. She models how it’s possible to bring this out into the open, not in order to fight but in order to draw closer. She shows how we can all do this hour by hour, encounter by encounter, in ordinary times and spaces.” –Krista Tippet

Rankine’s bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014), uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images, to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society. A defining text for our time, Citizen was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. Citizen was nominated for the Hurston/Wright 2015 Legacy Award, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, and was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014, who stated: “This collection examines everyday encounters with racism in the second person, forcing the reader—regardless of identity—to engage a narrative haunted by the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride.” Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.

This project is made possible with funds from ReStart the Arts, a regrant program of ArtsWestchester with support from the Office of the Governor, the New York State Legislature and the New York State Council on the Arts.