Here's why AWPA chose Citizen: An American Lyric...
If you're interested in the intersection of literature, race, politics, and inward reflection, join AWPA in reading Claudia Rankine's award-winning book, Citizen! In her brief but powerful pieces of prose poetry, this Macarthur genius-award winner exposes the origins and impacts of microaggressions on friendship, the self, and the interwoven world we share.
About the book
Citizen: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society. - Goodreads
Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap. . . . This work is careful, loving, the restorative witness is itself an act of resistance, a proof of endurance. ―Bookforum
From the author
About the readers
AWPA
This is AWPA's first summer read recommendation!