On Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2026, Claudia Rankine, international legal scholar, diplomat, and human rights leader, will be the keynote speaker for the 2026 Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at Boston University. The lecture will be held in the Tsai Performance Center and streamed online.
Event overview:
Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
Her first published play, The White Card, was published with Graywolf Press in 2019. She also co-produces a video series, “The Situation,” alongside John Lucas, and is the founder of the Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination.
Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020), is a collection of essays where Rankine questions what it means in these spaces to interrogate white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and the alarming move toward Brexit.
To learn more about the Howard Zinn Lecture Series, visit Boston University.
