JUST US

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Claudia Rankine

JUST US
An American conversation

America is at war with itself. At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences?
Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into a conversation. Her recent collection of essays Just Us: An American Conversation is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together.

“Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. Written with humility and humour, criticism, and compassion, Just Us asks difficult questions and begins necessary conversations.” - Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Riveting” - Bernardine Evaristo

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). In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honours, 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 Programme in Fall 2021. She teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

Tessa Szyszkowitz is a foreign affairs commentator for Butterfly and a London correspondent for profile & Cicero. Her last book was Real Englishmen, Britain & Brexit (2018). She is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.