<div><p>"To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.</P><p>"It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a place of bodies that transcend the legislative, the economic—in other words, transcend the stuff that doesn't lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination is postracial, a posthistorical and postpolitical utopia. . . . To bring up race for these writers is to inch close to the anxious space of affirmative action, the scarring qualifieds.</P><p>"So everyone is here."—Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, from the introduction</P><p>In 2011, a poem published in a national magazine by a popular white male poet made use of a black female body. A conversation ensued, and ended. Claudia Rankine subsequently created Open Letter, a web forum for writers to relate the effects and affects of racial difference and to explore art's failure, thus far, to adequately imagine.</P><p>Born in Kingston, Jamaica, <b>Claudia Rankine</b> is author and editor of more than six collections of poetry and poetics. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor of English at Pomona College.</P><p><b>Beth Loffreda</b> is author of <i>Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-gay Murder</i>. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wyoming.<br></div>