Claudia Rankine


Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, playwright, and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays, and various essays.
Her book of poetry, , won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award in poetry, the 2015 PEN Open Book Award, the 2015 PEN American Center USA Literary Award, the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2015 Literary Award. Citizen was also a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. It is the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.
Rankine's numerous awards and honors include the 2014 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and the 2014 Lannan Foundation Literary Award. In 2005, she was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. She is a 2016 United States Artist Zell Fellow and a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.
Rankine previously taught at Pomona College., she is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. In 2013, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Life and work

Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at Williams College and Columbia University. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Harper's, GRANTA, the Kenyon Review, and the Lana Turner Journal. She co-edits the anthology series American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language.
Winner of an Academy of American Poets fellowship, Rankine's work Don't Let Me Be Lonely, an experimental project, has been acclaimed for its unique blend of poetry, essay, lyric and television imagery. Of this volume, poet Robert Creeley wrote, "Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I've yet seen. It's master work in every sense, and altogether her own."
Rankine's play The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue was a 2011 Distinguished Development Project Selection in the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage.
In 2014, Graywolf Press published her book of poetry .
Rankine also works on documentary multimedia pieces with her husband, photographer and filmmaker John Lucas. These video essays are titled Situations.
Of her work, poet Mark Doty wrote, "Claudia Rankine's formally inventive poems investigate many kinds of boundaries: the unsettled territory between poetry and prose, between the word and the visual image, between what it's like to be a subject and the ways we're defined from outside by skin color, economics, and global corporate culture. This fearless poet extends American poetry in invigorating new directions."
She additionally founded and curates the Racial Imaginary Institute, which Rankine called "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."
In 2017, Rankine collaborated with choreographer and performer Will Rawls to generate the work What Remains. Collaborators included Tara Aisha Willis, Jessica Pretty, Leslie Cuyjet, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. The work premiered at Bard College, and has been performed at national venues, including Danspace in New York, the Walker Art Center, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art Warehouse Space. In an interview with Rawls, Rankine described how text and language were manipulated in the performance: "As a writer, you spend a lot of time trying to get all of these words to communicate a feeling or to communicate an action, and to be able to get rid of the words but still hold the feeling was stunning to me."

The Racial Imaginary Institute

The Racial Imaginary Institute is an interdisciplinary collective established in 2017 by Rankine using funds from her 2016 MacArthur Grant. TRII is a think tank for artists and writers who study whiteness and examine race as a construct. Its mission is to convene "a cultural laboratory in which the racial imaginaries of our time and place are engaged, read, countered, contextualized and demystified."
Rankine envisions the organization as occupying a physical space in Manhattan; until that is possible, the institute is roving. In 2017, the Whitney Museum presented "Perspectives on Race and Representation: An Evening With the Racial Imaginary Institute" to address the debate sparked by Dana Schutz’s painting "Open Casket." In the summer of 2018, TRII presented "On Whiteness," an exhibition, symposium, library, residencies, and performances, at The Kitchen in New York.

Awards and honors