Claudia Rankine in conversation with Garrett Bradley

March 1st, 2022

The Rose O’Neill Literary House, in partnership with the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University and the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, hosted a joint talk with Claudia Rankine and Garrett Bradley on Tuesday, March 1st at 6:00 p.m. The conversation was a Zoom event, made open to students at each respective college, where Rankine and Bradley shared their recent works and engaged in a moderated discussion about their creative processes. Garrett Bradley is an award-winning film director, having been the first African American woman to have won the Best Director award at Sundance 2020 for her documentary Time. The film, which she discussed during the talk, centers around intimacy and the relationships between Black women, white women, and their mothers. She stated that one cannot have real justice without first achieving intimacy. Claudia Rankine is an award-winning poet known for her collection Citizen: An American Lyric, as well as being the recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Lannan Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She discussed her most recent work Just Us: An American Conversation, published in 2021, which addresses the difficulties of being African American in white spaces, especially public and professional ones, and the many ways in which society still benefits from white supremacy. Both speakers were able to discern where their creative works intersected, and had much praise for each other, making for an intimate experience not unlike what each of their works long for. 

Coverage by Amara Sorosiak ‘23