Citizen in the Classroom

Careful readers will notice differences between copies of Citizen from different printings. Citizen has gone through twenty-two separate printings as of August 2020. You can find out which printing you're reading by looking on the copyright page of the book. Below the ISBN toward the bottom of the page is a line of numbers. The lowest number in that line is the book's printing.

The majority of a book's content does not change from printing to printing, but sometimes authors feel that changes are necessary in order to respond to current events or to further refine or clarify their texts. In Citizen, this can be seen in Rankine's changes to several pages in the book, but especially her changes to page 134. By including the names of additional African Americans who have been killed since each previous printing, Rankine is further underscoring the devastating urgency of Citizen's message. In this pdf, you can see page 134 from the first, second, third, eighth, tenth, thirteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-second printings of Citizen, one after another. Citizen is now in its twenty-second printing. The following Slate article also discusses these changes: "The New Printing of Citizen Adds a Haunting Message About Police Brutality."

• Claudia Rankine's website has additional work exploring the themes of Citizen, including a series of video essays called "Situations." Rankine has also launched the Racial Imaginary Institute as a way to further explore the questions raised in the book.
• The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston compiled these discussion questions in collaboration with Graywolf.
• Southern Humanities Review has put out this resource for students and teachers.
• The Los Angeles Review of Books looked at Citizen from multiple angles: Roundtable I, Roundtable II, Symposium I, Symposium II
• Suzi F. Garcia wrote this piece about teaching Citizen for The University of Arizona Poetry Center's blog.
• At Teachers & Writers, Phylis Meshulam detailed the lesson plan she developed for sixth grade students to engage with Citizen.
• The City of Charleston, SC, received an NEA Big Read grant to make copies of Citizen available to residents, as reported by the Post and Courier.

Along with recent pieces in the New York Times Magazine about Charleston, and a piece on NFL player Cam Newton in The Undefeated, Rankine also wrote a play, The White Card, which was produced in Boston in early 2018 and published by Graywolf in March 2019.

Rankine’s next book-length work is Just Us: An American Conversation, forthcoming from Graywolf in September 2020.

You can purchase Citizen at your local independent bookstore, or wherever books are sold. 

If you are interested in larger purchases for your school or community, you can email citizen@graywolfpress.org.