Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican-American poet, essayist, and playwright whose work interrogates race, citizenship, and American identity in forms that blur the boundaries between poetry, essay, and visual art. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New York City. Her fifth collection, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), is widely regarded as one of the most important American poetry books of the twenty-first century. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (the only book to be nominated in both the poetry and criticism categories), the PEN Open Book Award, the PEN Literary Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It has been described as a lyric essay on race in America, with alternating verse and prose sections addressing microaggressions, institutional racism, and Black grief. Rankine's earlier collections include Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Nothing in Nature Is Private (1994). Her play The White Card (2018) extends her examination of race to the visual arts world. She is also the co-editor of the influential anthology American Poets in the 21st Century. Rankine has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and is the founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She lives in New York.