One Book, One Regis

As you transition to college, we hope that you will bring your full self to this experience. Our campus is a microcosm of society, a community which is re-made every year by its new students. This is an active process that requires people from diverse backgrounds to communicate and negotiate what it means to belong together. Like gender, sexuality, or class, race structures our experience of the world and how the world treats us. So we invite you – all first-year students – to write a short story or poem about an experience with race, racism, or antiracism.

Submissions will be compiled and archived by the One Book, One Regis committee, and shown to Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen, when she visits campus in November. Excerpts may be displayed around campus with the writer’s permission.

Submissions should be a maximum of 750 words, written in the language of your choice. Please submit your story or poem by 5pm on Wednesday, October 16, 2024, to fye@regis.edu with the subject line “Citizen Storytelling Project." Please be sure to title your work and include your name in the document. Independent of your submission, please consider identifying a passage from Citizen that you found most inspiring.

 Your story or poem could respond to one or more of the following questions:

1. When have I noticed that my race influenced a situation?
2. Where have I found myself complicit with racism?
3. How has engaging with antiracist work transformed me?
4. Why has it been important for me to recognize the reality of structural or systemic racism?

—from Anti-Racism Ministry