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Claudia Rankine—the bestselling author of Citizen and Just Us—joins us for a conversation that moves beyond the page, exploring friendship, grief, and what it means to truly see one another in a time of relentless loss.Q&A with Jodi-Ann Burey.
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, Rankine shifts into new registers of sustained narrative, memory, art criticism, and lyric essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing to date.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between the narrator and the theorist—unnamed but real self-identified sisters who struggled to define their wounded histories and their shared and separate lives. During college, they invented a game of collapse: every time they saw each other, they both had to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continued off and on again for decades, “collapse” took on new dimensions of meaning seen and experienced in the violence of their pasts, in artworks depicting Black figures in states of exhaustion, in the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and in the antagonism of their conversation and their love for one another.
Triage becomes an essential argument for both the necessity of seeing and grieving and the demand for conviction and action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we’ve unexpectedly come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the award-winning author of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen, and Just Us. A MacArthur Fellow and professor at NYU, Rankine lives in New York City.
Jodi-Ann Burey (she/her) is a writer, critic, and sought-after speaker on race, culture, and health equity. She is the author of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work. Her essays appear in various arts, business, and literary publications. Jodi-Ann is the creative director and host of Lit Lounge: The People’s Art, a prose and poetry salon and podcast. She was born in Jamaica, raised in New York City and now lives in Seattle.
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