Claudia Rankine
Claudia is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”; two plays including “Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue”; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including “The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.” For “Citizen,” Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (“Citizen” was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for the National Book Award, “Citizen” also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.