Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine, born in nineteen sixty-three, is a distinguished Jamaican-American poet, essayist, playwright, and editor of several anthologies. With a prolific career, she has authored five volumes of poetry, two plays, and a variety of essays, establishing herself as a significant voice in contemporary literature.

Her groundbreaking work, Citizen: An American Lyric, garnered numerous accolades, including the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, making history as the first book to be nominated in both poetry and criticism. This remarkable collection also received the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, and the NAACP Image Award in poetry, among others. Notably, Citizen is the only poetry book to achieve New York Times bestseller status in the nonfiction category.

Rankine's contributions to literature have been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Jackson Poetry Prize in two thousand fourteen. She was honored with the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets in two thousand five and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy in two thousand thirteen. In two thousand sixteen, she became a MacArthur Fellow and a United States Artist Zell Fellow, and in two thousand twenty, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In her academic career, Rankine has taught at Pomona College and served as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Currently, she is a Professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she continues to inspire and educate the next generation of writers.