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.”

Aptly, Rankine’s next book takes on the subject of “white construction” and the history—from 1700s to now—of the racial imaginary of whiteness. Whiteness, she says, has “never been the object of inquiry to understand its paranoia, its violence, its rage.” Rankine is also currently working on a play “in conversation with Citizen.”

Rankine’s projects were inspired in part by a recent visit to a bookstore at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, where she “asked them for books on whiteness.... [b]ooks that address the ways in which white contemporary artists deal with whiteness, interrogate it, analyze it, work in ways that push up with constructions of whiteness,” but to no avail. She reported similar experiences at a few other bookstores.

Related reading: In an essay for Lit Hub, Gary Younge explores the question of “who counts” to the media when people die and why.

Photo Credit: AWP/Robb Cohen Photography