Poet Camille Rankine to Read on Oct. 12

09/27/2016 

Camille Rankine, author of the full-length poetry collection Incorrect Merciful Impulses and the recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, will give a reading on Wednesday, Oct. 12, at SUNY Cortland.

Her presentation, which continues the English Department’s Distinguished Voices in Literature Lecture series, begins at 5 p.m. in Brockway Hall, Jacobus Lounge.

The event is free and open to the public.

A visiting professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst’s MFA for Poets and Writers, Rankine lives in New York City.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

Incorrect Merciful Impulses, Rankine’s first full-length poetry collection, was published in January by Copper Canyon Press. She also wrote the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship.

Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Narrative, Paper Darts, A Public Space and Tin House.

Rankine received a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in 2013 and was named an Honorary Cave Canem fellow in 2012. She serves on the executive committee of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the board of trustees of The Poetry Project. Rankine also co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival Poetry Committee.

A finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, she was featured as an emerging poet in the Fall 2010 issue of American Poet and the April 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

The event is co-sponsored by The President’s Fund, the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs’ Office, and the Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee.

For more information, contact Heather Bartlett, lecturer in English, at 607-753-2230, or Tyler Bradway, assistant professor of English, at 607-753-2077.