Jonathon Smith and I talk with poet and playwright Claudia Rankine about her powerful book, Citizen: An American Lyric; the collection combines poetry, prose and art in a masterful commentary on racism in America. Citizen has garnered many awards, the most recent, PEN American Center's Open Book Award. Citizen combines poetry, prose and art in a masterful commentary on racism in America. Written before the death of Michael Brown and published in the aftermath, Claudia Rankine's book addresses leaning on words and meanings, the horror of the ordinary, and the realities of what it is to be inside a community where young black men and women could die at any moment. 

--Ann