Claudia Rankine
| Claudia Rankine | |
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| File:Author Photo of Claudia Rankine.jpg
Rankine in 2014
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| Born | 1963 |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Williams College; Columbia University |
| Genre | Poetry; Playwright |
Claudia Rankine (born 1963) 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. Rankine is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California.
Her most recent work, the book-length poem, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry (the first book in the award’s history to be nominated in both poetry and criticism), 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 VIDA Literary Award. Citizen was also a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and is a finalist for the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. Citizen 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 include the the 2014 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, as well as a 2014 Lannan Foundation Literary Award. In 2005, Rankine was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. Rankine's work often blends genres and explores the subject matter of race and the imagination.
Life and work
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, educated at Williams College and Columbia University, Rankine's work has appeared in many journals, including Harper's, GRANTA, the Kenyon Review, and Lana Turner. She also co-edits (with Lisa Sewell) the anthology series American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. She is a co-editor of The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
Winner of an Academy of American Poets fellowship, Rankine's work Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), an experimental project, has been acclaimed for its unique blend of poetry, essay, lyric and television imagery. About 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."[1]
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"Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks you begin to understand yourself as rendered hyper-visible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back as insane as it is, saying please."
Claudia Rankine[2]
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.[3] Also of note, Rankine devotes time to work on documentary multimedia pieces with her husband, photographer John Lucas. [4] In 2013, Rankine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.[5]
In 2014, Graywolf Press published her book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric.[6][7]
About her work, the poet Mark Doty said, "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."[8]
Awards and honors
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- 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Poetry) winner for Citizen: An American Lyric[9][10]
- 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) finalist for Citizen: An American Lyric[9]
- 2014 California Book Awards Poetry Finalist for Citizen: An American Lyric[11]
- 2015 PEN Center USA Poetry Award: for Citizen: An American Lyric[12]
- 2015 New York Times Bestseller for Citizen: An American Lyric[13]
- 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry for Citizen: An American Lyric[14]
- 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry for Citizen: An American Lyric[15]
- 2015 Forward Prize for Citizen: Am American Lyric[16][17]
Selected publications
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- The End of the Alphabet, Grove Press, 1998; Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- Plot, Grove Press, 2001; Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Graywolf Press, 2004. ISBN 9781555974077
- Citizen: An American Lyric, Graywolf Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-55597-348-3
References
- ↑ Pomona College Magazine online: news release
- ↑ Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature page at African American Literature Book Club site.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Ashley Harris, "UTSA hosts creative writing, reading series", UTSA Today, April 4, 2007.
- ↑ Academy of American Poets Names New Chancellors: Marilyn Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and C. D. Wright
- ↑ Dan Chiasson, "Colour Codes", The New Yorker, October 27, 2014.
- ↑ Adam Fitzgerald, "'That's not poetry; it's sociology!' – in defence of Claudia Rankine's Citizen", The Guardian, October 23, 2015.
- ↑ Claudia Rankine at poets.org.
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- ↑ Carolyn Kellogg, "Claudia Rankine and Meghan Daum lead 2015 PEN Literary Awards", Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2015.
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- ↑ "Claudia Rankine's 'exhilarating' poetry wins Forward prize", BBC News, September 29, 2015.
- ↑ Tristram Fane Saunders, "Claudia Rankine wins £10,000 Forward prize with book of prose poems", The Telegraph, September 30, 2015.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Claudia Rankine. |
| External video | |
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 Interview w/Tavis Smiley, December 8, 2014; c. 15 minutes. |
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| Book Discussion on Citizen: An American Lyric, C-SPAN, April 19, 2015 |
- Claudia Rankine, Poet – at Blue Flower Arts
- Claudia Rankine, "'The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning'", The New York Times, June 22, 2015
- Claudia Rankine, "The Meaning of Serena Williams", The New York Times, August 25, 2015
- Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka’s ‘S O S’ – February 11, 2015 New York Times Book Review
- Claudia Rankine, Interview with Lauren Berlant in Bomb magazine
- Paula Cocozza, "Poet Claudia Rankine: ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’", The Guardian, June 29, 2015
- Situation Videos – video essays on contemporary issues
- Academy of American Poets site – Her site includes an excerpt from Don't Let Me Be Lonely.
- The Dead Spectator – this review of Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Alex Young appeared on-line at The Brooklyn Rail in July 2005<./small>
- Use mdy dates from November 2015
- Pages with broken file links
- Incomplete lists from January 2015
- Commons category link is defined as the pagename
- 1963 births
- African-American women writers
- Living people
- Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
- Place of birth missing (living people)
- People from Kingston, Jamaica
- American women poets
- Jamaican poets
