Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

The following is Claudia Rankine reading from the poem "Making Room" from Citizen: An American Lyric. See pages 131-133.  "...where he goes the space follows him..." Below, Jason Reynolds reads from the beginning of Long Way Down  "if the blood inside you is on the inside of someone else you never want to see it on the outside of them..."

The book selected for the 2018 Big Read is Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. At 162 pages this book is dense!  Not necessarily dense with words, but dense with emotion. Of course, before reading it, I thought, Oh, a poetry book, it's pretty short so let's add another book of prose to read as well."  This is how we ended up with two books for the June 2nd discussion.  Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is the first work of poetry to become a New York Times bestseller for multiple weeks on the paperback nonfiction list. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and was also a finalist for the ward in criticism, the first time in the history of those awards that a book was named a finalist in more than one category. Citizen is a genre-bending work of art combining lyric prose with visual art. This book examines racism in through specific examples of racism in everyday life (referred to as microaggressions)as well as the phys...

We are reading They Can’t Kill Us All for discussion on Jan. 6, 2018.  We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates is our book to read for Black History Month! It’s a bestseller and getting a lot of praise.   Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, is the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. It’s 304 pages long.  We should read this! Toni Morrison’s book, The Origin of Others is very short. Combining it with one of her novels seems like a good idea. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has been chosen for the Big Read of 2018. It ‘s a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Because it’s short (and it’s a poetry book) I was thinking we’d read it with another book of verse: Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down. The Floating World is a novel about Hurricane Katrina and Jane Crow is a biography of Pauli Murray. It may be too long (512 pages!) The Talented Ribkins...