Claudia Rankine's book-length poem 'Citizen' was nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards in the categories of poetry and criticism. It is one of the most devastating takes on American culture I have read in a long time, laying bare the stakes of being black in a country long ambivalent about our presence here.
Tags: long, culture, poetry, time

Other Quotes by "Glenn Ligon"

Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.
Tags: writing, literature, humanity, black
Artists such as Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Byron Kim and Stephen Andrews and I are around the same age, and I know them personally. The discussions I have had with them over the years have influenced the work that I have made throughout my career.
Tags: career, know, age, work
One of the interesting things about quoting in an artwork is that there is a repeated confusion about who is speaking - one essentially becomes the author of a quote one uses.
Tags: confusion, interesting, things, who
Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.
Tags: race, literature, stand, lose
I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.
Tags: fails, interested, language
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