Claudia Rankine, AWP 2016 Keynote speaker and author of the National Book Award–winning Citizen: An American Lyric, plans to donate the funds of her MacArthur “genius grant,” the Guardian reports. Her $625,000 stipend will go toward the founding of the Racial Imaginary Institute, a think tank where artists and writers have the space to “show art, to curate dialogues, have readings, and talk about the ways in which the structure of white supremacy in American society influences our culture,” Rankine said to the Guardian. The gallery will be in downtown Manhattan, “where those discussions begin,” and where “culture really does determine what we think [and] how we think about things.”
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