Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine in 2013. Photo by John Lucas. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Claudia Rankine (born 1963) is an African-American poet and playwright

Life

Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised there and in New York City. She was educated at Williams College and Columbia University.

Rankine's work has appeared in many journals, including Southern Review, AGNI, and Kenyon Review, and anthologies including On the Verge and Step into a World: A global anthology of the new Black literature (2000). She also co-edited (with Juliana Spahr) the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where lyric meets language.

"There are billions of souls in the world and some of us are almost to be touching the depths of how it is and what it is to be human. On the surface we exist but just beyond is existence. I write to articulate that felt experience. My first book of poems, Nothing in Nature is Private, existed in the experience of Black, Jamaican, person, woman in a bruised world [...] I think sometimes I am too private, too lonely in my heart, but my mind rows constantly as if involved in a public disturbance. When poet Paul Celan writes “pray Lord, pray to us, we are near,” I feel he speaks of me and I with him in talking to God. There are some of us who are constantly mending our hearts, I write into that mending, my writing is that mending. Anyway, here I am, Claudia Rankine, born in Jamaica, in 1963, here is my art."

Claudia Rankine

She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine was the Henry G. Lee Professor of Poetry at Pomona College.

Also of note, Rankine devotes time to work on documentary multimedia pieces with her husband, photographer John Lucas.

Writing

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 TV 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.”

Recognition

Don't Let Me Be Lonely won Rankine an Academy of American Poets fellowship.

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.

Publications

Poetry

• Nothing in Nature Is Private. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1994.
• The End of the Alphabet. New York: Grove Press, 1998.
• Plot. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
• Bleached Debris. New York: Center for Book Arts, 2001.
• Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American lyric. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004.
• Citizen: An American lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014.

Edited

• American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where lyric meets language (edited with Juliana Spahr). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
• American Poets in the 21st Century: The new poetics (edited with Lisa Sewell). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
• Eleven more American women poets in the 21st Century: Poetics across North America (edited with Lisa Sewell). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

Claudia Rankine's poem 'Stop and Frisk'

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

African-American poets

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Claudia Rankine at The Poetry Center (profile & 3 poems)
• Claudia Rankine profile & 10 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Claudia Rankine b. 1963 at the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

• Claudia Rankine at YouTube

Books

• Claudia Rankine at Amazon.com

About

• Claudia Rankine, poet at Blue Flower Arts
• "The Dead Spectator" – review of Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Alex Young, Brooklyn Rail, 2005.