From October 2024 to May 2025, The Arts & Justice Collective will hold various literary, art and social justice events and programs centering around Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric." The Big Read Cape Cod is in collaboration with a wide range of community partners, including libraries, cultural centers, social/racial justice organizations, theaters, literary and art organizations and local artists.

The national theme for this year’s NEA Big Read is “Where We Live,” and is designed to have communities exploring their sense of place and all of the ramifications of living in and belonging to a certain place.

We live on Cape Cod, known to be a vacation destination with beautiful beaches and fancy houses. But Cape Cod is so much more than beaches, fried seafood and ice cream. We are a community made up of people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and dreams.

Undeniably, Cape Cod is full of white space, and people of color can often feel othered and experience racism on a daily basis here. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s not. Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric” will have our community exploring how racism and microaggressions show up in these current times. It will have our community taking a hard long look at its impact on the members of our community. At the same time, it will speak volumes to our BIPOC community - that we are heard, we are understood and we are not alone.