Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is one of the most important poets and essayists working in America today, known for hybrid works that dissolve the boundaries between poetry, prose, and visual art in order to examine race, citizenship, and what it means to inhabit a Black body in the United States. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963, she came to the United States to attend Williams College, where she earned her B.A., before receiving her M.F.A. from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
She taught at the University of Georgia, Pomona College, and Yale University before joining the faculty at New York University. Her earlier poetry collections established her as a formally adventurous and politically engaged writer, but it was Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) that brought her work to the widest possible audience. Citizen weaves together lyric poems, prose poems, essays, and images to address microaggressions, racial violence, sports, and the accumulated daily injuries of American racism. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and became a crossover bestseller remarkable for a volume of poetry.
Her earlier book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) pioneered the hybrid documentary-lyric form that she developed further in Citizen. Her 2020 work Just Us: An American Conversation extends this project, exploring what it means to try to have honest conversations about race across difference. Rankine also co-founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, a cultural and scholarly collective devoted to creating space to think about race and racism in the arts.
Rankine has received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Jackson Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other honors. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work has been translated into numerous languages and continues to shape conversations about poetry, race, and American civic life.
