New-Old, Old-New: Erica Dawson’s When Rap Spoke Straight to God
Dawson plays with many tropes—light and dark, the spiritual vs. the corporeal—while questioning the everyday myths that surround us.
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Posts Tagged: Claudia Rankine
A Séance of a Book: Talking with Allie Rowbottom
Allie Rowbottom discusses her debut memoir, JELL-O GIRLS.
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Poet-Cosmologist: A Conversation with Bruce Beasley
“The cusp of errand and awe is where poetry always is for me.”
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Notable San Francisco: 5/16–5/22
Literary events and readings in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Taking Back Control: A Conversation with Joseph Osmundson
Joseph Osmundson discusses his memoir, Inside/Out, intimacy, trauma, and the sometimes violence of desire.
...moreWhy I Chose Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Here’s what we’re reading in our Poetry Book Club next month!
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What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Black History
Rumpus editors share for their favorite writing that speaks to black history, past and present.
...moreNotable Portland 2/8–2/14
Literary events and readings in and around Portland this week!
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What to Read When You Want Fire and Fury
Rumpus editors share a list of books by writers of color and women that bring fire, fury, and sometimes, both.
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Slush Piles in White
The sensibilities of whiteness do not want us to work, do not want us to think, do not want us to imagine outside of its bounds.
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A Deeply Human Act: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar discusses his new collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, finding community in poetry, books on craft, and mining the supernatural for poems.
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The Woman Behind the Curtain Pulling the Levers: Talking with Zinzi Clemmons
Zinzi Clemmons on What We Lose, representations of blackness, and life’s influences on writing.
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What to Read When It’s Time for Sports
Just a “heads up” (as they say in the sports world): this isn’t your average sports list.
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What to Read When You Want to Make America Great Again
Here is a list of books that help remind us what actually makes America great (hint: it’s not tax cuts).
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What Is Being Charted Here?: Talking with Jennifer S. Cheng
Poet and essayist Jennifer S. Cheng discusses her collection House A, working “in the dark,” and the idea of home.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Amy Benson
Our American obsession with the personal and individual has made us the tremendous resource consumers we are in the world.
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Haunted by Child Refugees: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends
These aren’t ghosts; these are children who have braved a perilous journey to escape the violent nightmares back home.
...moreNotable NYC: 4/8–4/14
Saturday 4/8: Chris Hayes presents A Colony in a Nation in conversation with Wesley Lowery. St. Joseph’s College, 6 p.m, $30. Claudia Rankine and Garnette Cadogan give the keynote address at the Focus Festival running on Saturday and Sunday. Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 7 p.m., $20. Julia Loktev and Sukhdev Sandhu join the Segue series. Zinc […]
...moreNotable NYC: 3/4–3/10
Saturday 3/4: Peter Blackstock, senior editor at Grove Atlantic, curates Queer as Volk as part of the Festival Neue Literatur. Powerhouse Arena, 6 p.m, free. Timothy Liu and Christopher Salerno launch new books of poetry. Berl’s Poetry Shop, 7 p.m., free. Michael Nicoloff and Christopher Stackhouse join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. […]
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A Recommended Reading List for Trump’s America
We asked nineteen authors what books they’d suggest as recommended reading in light of America’s new political reality.
...morePoem of the Day: “Sound & Fury” by Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is an oracle. Her poetry is beautiful, interrogative, and inventive, as seen in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen (the American lyric we need for a path forward). Her consideration and public consciousness is nothing less than illuminating, and necessary in these dire times mercilessly lacking in empathy.
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The Rumpus Interview with Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau discusses her essay, “Know Your Rights!” from the collection, The Fire This Time, what she loves about motherhood, and why it’s time for White America to get uncomfortable.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
What is lost still has substance, is malleable, can take on new impressions, and be molded again to our experience, often resulting in the most lasting force that determines how we see the world.
...moreIntervening in the Everyday
For BuzzFeed Reader, Tamerra Griffin speaks with Claudia Rankine—author of Citizen and recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur Genius fellowships—about police violence, forms of protest, and how she would have woven these topics into her acclaimed book had she been writing it this year: I would have added images around many of these protests that […]
...morePoetic Citizens
Over at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center blog, Suzi F. Garcia challenges the idea of poetry as a niche act of the elites by showing just how vital and contagious teaching a text like Citizen can be: Move poetry outside of its context. Find a way to protest. Bring it to students in classrooms, […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Ramona Ausubel
I find tremendous hope in the act of storytelling—the way we can redirect energy, to reclaim history, to build back lives that have been otherwise upset.
...moreThe Privilege of Innocence
In a powerful essay at Electric Literature, Nicole Dennis-Benn writes on innocence as a privilege that is not afforded to black children: Truth is, there is nothing parents can do. There is nothing black parents can do to protect their children and their children’s innocence. Diamond Reynold’s four-year-old daughter can attest to this as she […]
...moreThe Moment of Change is the Only Poem
In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. Over at the New Yorker, Claudia Rankine writes about the transformations Adrienne Rich underwent in search of ethics and the willful “I,” from the brief attempt at objectivity in her earliest poems to her refusal of the National Medal for […]
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