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Biography
American

Claudia Rankine

1963

Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican-American poet, essayist, and playwright whose Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) — a genre-defying work combining poetry, prose, visual art, and cultural criticism to address racial aggression in everyday American life — was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and one of the most important American literary works of the twenty-first century.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Claudia Rankine (b. 1963) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in the Bronx, New York. She studied at Williams College and Columbia University. She teaches at Yale University, where she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute.

Life and Career

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) — a hybrid text combining poetry, prose, and images — established the form she would refine in Citizen. The book explores depression, media saturation, and the experience of Blackness in America through a collage of lyric fragments and reproduced images.

Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) — which uses second-person address to place the reader inside the experience of racial microaggressions, police violence, and systemic racism — was a cultural event. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (the first book to win in two categories, also being nominated for criticism) and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) — about the possibilities and limits of interracial dialogue — continues the project.

Major Works and Themes

Rankine writes about race, Blackness, visibility, and the daily violence of American life. Her work dissolves the boundaries between poetry, essay, and visual art. Citizen is one of the few contemporary poems to become genuinely mainstream cultural currency.

Key Works

  • Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) — National Book Critics Circle Award

Collecting Rankine

Citizen first edition (Graywolf Press, 2014) brings $40–$100. The book went through multiple printings rapidly; true first printings are identifiable by the number line. Rankine signs at lectures and poetry festivals.