BOOKFEST PREVIEW
Claudia Rankine presents “Triage” in conversation with Kaye Wise Whitehead
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
SNF PARKWAY Theatre
Baltimore, MD 21201
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine
shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet. Claudia returns to the CityLit stage (She was featured in the 13th CityLit Festival for Citizen in 2016) in partnership with Red Emma’s as a preview to this year’s Baltimore Book Festival. Dr. Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead, executive director of the Karson Institute for Race, Peace, and Social Justice, will join her in conversation about her new work, Triage.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for 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 we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
This is the first event of a special preview weekend held on September 12 and 13th for the annual Baltimore Book Festival, which takes place in Waverly on September 19th and 20th. This event is FREE, but registration is required. RSVP to be guaranteed admittance. You are welcome to preorder your copy of the book for pickup at the event.
Brought to you by CityLit Project and Red Emma’s as part of the 2026 Baltimore Book Festival.
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Claudia Rankine is the author of Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric, and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine teaches at New York University.
https://claudiarankine.com/
Kaye Wise Whitehead is the host of the award-winning radio show Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA, 88.9 FM; the founding executive director of The Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice; and a professor of communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland. She is well known in Baltimore City for her work as an activist scholar, for hosting the monthly free Saturday Freedom Schools, and her recent Taharka Bros. ice-cream collaboration “Dr. Kaye’s Touch of Freedom”.
www.loyola.edu/join-us/karson-institute
Instagram: @blackmommyactivist
