Claudia Rankine

Born in Jamaica in 1963, Claudia Rankine earned her BA in English from Williams College and her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Rankine is the author of several works, including Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press, 2020); Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Book Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry, and the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.

Rankine has edited numerous anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015); American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007); and American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 

Her plays are Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre; Existing Conditions, co-authored with Casey Llewellyn; HELP, which premiered in March 2020 at The Shed in New York City and was re-staged in March 2022; and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 at ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019. 

She has also produced a number of videos in collaboration with John Lucas, including “Situation One.” In 2022, Rankine was awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2019, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

In 2005, Rankine was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. In 2016, Rankine was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and named a United States Artists Zell Fellow in literature. In 2017, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, “a moving collaboration with other collectives, spaces, artists, and organizations towards art exhibitions, readings, dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that engage the subject of race.”