Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has won the 2016 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. The $10,000 prize will be awarded to Rankine at a ceremony in April. At Artforum, Lauren O’Neill-Butler talks to the author about the Racial Imaginary Institute, which Rankine founded after winning her MacArthur “genius” grant last year. The institute is still settling on a location somewhere in New York, but Rankine hopes that it will be located somewhere more accessible than a university campus. “It would have been easier for me to bring it to an academic space,” she said. “I would have had more access and things would have moved much more quickly, but then we would have been inside an elite and closed space, and it would be harder to enter the mainstream.” Rankine also discussed why she thinks that our current system of white supremacy and the rise of the “alt-right” cannot be blamed on capitalism alone. “A good example is the people who are on the Affordable Care Act who say they want to keep it but who also want to get rid of ‘Obamacare,’” she said. “They understand that the ACA is useful to them, but they don’t want anything that is proximate to blackness near them. That’s not about the economy.”
The journals of late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley are being collected into a book. Da Capo Press will publish Jeff Buckley: His Own Voice in spring 2019.
The Mothers author Brit Bennett talks to The Millions about writing a screenplay, abortion, and the racial assumptions people made about her book. Many readers seemed surprised that Bennett would set a story about a black community in Southern California. “My working theory on this is that what people expect from a black story is a racism-driven plot,” she said. “My book is a story that is inflected by race, but the plot points don’t hinge on racism. That’s one way in which my book upends expectations. People think because it’s about a religious community it must be set in Mississippi.”
Over one hundred employees of the Wall Street Journal have signed a letter to editor in chief Gerard Baker and deputy editor Matt Murray requesting that management take steps to make the newsroom more diverse in terms of both race and gender. “There are currently four women and eight men listed as deputy managing editors, and both editorial page editors are men,” the letter points out. “Nearly all the people at high levels at the paper deciding what we cover and how are white men.”
BuzzFeed is opening an office in Austin, Texas. The website hopes to use the new location to break out of the New York-centric focus of most media companies.“As a lot of people who live in the South, or in the Midwest have observed, there’s sort of a coastal thing that happens where everyone writing most media is based in California or New York,” said Summer Anne Burton, who will be running the office. “So I definitely think it’s an advantage to be in Texas.”
Tonight at McNally Jackson, Harper’s Magazine hosts a discussion on resisters and collaborators with Masha Gessen, Kate Crawford, Corey Robin, Lawrence Jackson, and Sarah Schulman.