Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963 and later moved to New York City with her family when she was seven years old. In New York, she went to Roman Catholic elementary and secondary schools, both of which were located in the Bronx. She later received a degree from Williams College in 1986 before going on to obtain a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Columbia University in 1993. She published her first book of poetry, Nothing in Nature Is Private, in 1994, followed by her second book, The End of the Alphabet, in 1998. Three years later, she published a longer, book-length poem entitled Plot. Her first widely recognized work was the multimedia book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, which was published in 2004 and in some ways served as a stylistic precursor to 2014’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Citizen also won Rankine the NAACP Image Award for poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, among other prizes. She has served as a professor of literature and creative writing at Barnard College, the University of Georgia, the University of Houston, Pomona College, and Case Western Reserve University. She currently teaches at Yale University.