Claudia Rankine and Emma Dabiri: Just Us

Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist and playwright. Just Us completes her ground-breaking 'American Lyric' trilogy, following Don't Let Me Be Lonely and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Citizen. A MacArthur Fellow and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Yale University. Rankine's numerous awards and honours include the 2014 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and the 2014 Lannan Foundation Literary Award. In 2005, she was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets.

Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian academic, activist, broadcaster and teaching fellow in the Africa department at SOAS and a Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths. Her 2019 debut Don’t Touch My Hair, (Penguin) was an Irish Times Bestseller and published to critical and commercial acclaim. The book also inspired a national conversation about race and hair and has led to changing regulations in schools and in the British army.

A regular broadcaster on the BBC, Emma presented 'Back in Time Brixton' (BBC2), 'Britain's Lost Masterpieces' (BBC4), as well as the sociological experiment 'Is Love Racist?' (Ch4). Most recently, she hosted Radio 4's critically-acclaimed documentary 'Journeys into Afro-futurism’.