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Claudia Rankine

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Claudia Rankine
Born1963
OccupationProfessor
NationalityAmerican
Alma materWilliams College;
Columbia University
GenrePoetry; Playwright
Notable awardsMacArthur Fellow

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 was inspire to become a writer at a young age. During her youth, her mother would read Emily Dickinson to her. In particular, Rankine remembers her mother reading Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" years after moving to the United States from Jamaica.[1] Rankine also cites poet Adrienne Rich as an inspiration for her writing. In Rich's work, Rankine saw "something about the way in which [she] addressed social issues from a very person position that made [her] want to write".[1] Furthermore, Rankine says, she felt that Rich said "almost what she wanted to say" in her writing;[2] therein further motivating Rankine to pursue her craft.

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.

Her numerous awards and honors include 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.

Not only is Rankine a highly accomplished writer, she is also a highly accomplished teacher. She has held positions at the University of Houston, University of Georgia, Barnard College, and Case Western.[3] In addition to these positions, Rankine was also awarded the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry position at Yale University and the Henry G. Lee Professor of English position at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Currently, she is Aerol Arnold Chair of English at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.[1]

Life and work

Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at Williams College and Columbia University. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Harper's, GRANTA, the Kenyon Review, and the Lana Turner Journal. She also co-edits (with Lisa Sewell) the anthology series American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language.

Together, Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine co-edited the book The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. They co-wrote the introduction. It is the goal of this work, according to Loffreda and Rankine, to explore the impact of race upon the imagination. In the introduction, they argue that the imagination of the writer is not transcendent or ahistorical. Rather, it is culturally bound. As such, writers tend to reinforce the common tropes of what it means to be African American. To be African American, Loffreda and Rankine claim, is to be written about, to lack self-determination. Their proposed solution is that writers embrace moments in which their imagination reaches its cultural limits. Loffreda and Rankine recommend sitting with and being marred in the moments of racial unknowability and ambiguity.

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."[4]

"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[5]

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.[6]

In 2014, Graywolf Press published her book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric,[7][8] which has brought her the most fame and recognition of all her books so far with more than 150,000 copies in print.[9] Citizen is a book that is hard to categorize, having been described as a work that "straddles" various genres, just as its nomination for a National Book Critic Circle Award in both poetry and criticism seems to show.[9]

When not working on her writing, Rankine also devotes time to working on documentary multimedia pieces with her husband, photographer John Lucas. The intention of these videos is to explore narration through video.[2] These documentary pieces, Rankine and Lucas have titled Situations. Located on their website http://claudiarankine.com/ are seven of their video essays. These video essays include: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Some of the themes explored in these videos are news reports of Hurrican Katrina and police shooting of black men.[2] Therefore, like in her other works, Rankine attempts to capture racism and the African American experience.

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."[10]

In 2016, Rankine was awarded the prestigious MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship. It comes with a stipend of 625,000 dollars. With this money, Rankine intends to found the Racial Imaginary Institute. The goal the Racial Imaginary Institute will be to "dismantle white supremacy" through multiple channels such as art, poetry, and other critical works.[2][11] According to Rankine, it is "a location where artists and thinkers can come together and put pressure on the language that makes apparent white supremacy and dominance".[2][11] The future location of the Racial Imaginary Institute will be in downtown Manhattan. This location is key to the institute's endeavors, as it positions the institute among other key institutions and galleries like Gagosian or Pace.[11]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

  • Nothing in Nature is Private. Cleveland St U Poetry Cntr. 1994. ISBN 978-1-880834-09-1.
  • The End of the Alphabet, Grove Press, 1998; The End of the Alphabet. Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated. December 1, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8021-9853-2.
  • Plot, Grove Press, 2001; Plot. Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated. December 1, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8021-9852-5.
  • 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

  1. ^ a b c "Renowned poet Claudia Rankine to join English department". Retrieved October 31, 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d e Rosenmann, Alexandra (October 19, 2016). "MacArthur Genius Author Claudia Rankine Is Investing Half a Million Dollars in Whiteness Study". AlterNet. Retrieved October 31, 2016.
  3. ^ "Claudia Rankine". Poetry Foundation. October 30, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2016.
  4. ^ Pomona College Magazine online: news release
  5. ^ Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature page at African American Literature Book Club site.
  6. ^ "The Bollingen Prize for Poetry 2011 Winner". Beinecke.library.yale.edu. Retrieved June 18, 2011.
  7. ^ Dan Chiasson, "Colour Codes", The New Yorker, October 27, 2014.
  8. ^ Adam Fitzgerald, "'That's not poetry; it's sociology!' – in defence of Claudia Rankine's Citizen", The Guardian, October 23, 2015.
  9. ^ a b Boris Kachka (April 1, 2016). "Claudia Rankine Takes on Teachers and Racists". Vulture.com (NYMedia LLC).{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) – this secondary source was prompted by Rankine's keynote address at the annual AWP convention in 2016
  10. ^ Claudia Rankine at poets.org.
  11. ^ a b c "Citizen Claudia: Rankine to Establish Institute to Study Whiteness| Nonprofit Quarterly". Non Profit News For Nonprofit Organizations | Nonprofit Quarterly. October 21, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2016.
  12. ^ a b "National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists for Publishing Year 2014". National Book Critics Circle. January 19, 2015. Retrieved January 29, 2015.
  13. ^ Alexandra Alter (March 12, 2015). "'Lila' Honored as Top Fiction by National Book Critics Circle". New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015.
  14. ^ "84th Annual California Book Awards Winners".
  15. ^ "2015 PEN Literary Award Winners". PEN. May 8, 2015. Retrieved March 2, 2016.
  16. ^ Carolyn Kellogg, "Claudia Rankine and Meghan Daum lead 2015 PEN Literary Awards", Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2015.
  17. ^ "Best Sellers". The New York Times. January 18, 2015. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  18. ^ Carolyn Kellogg (April 18, 2015). "The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes are ..."
  19. ^ "Winners of the '46th NAACP Image Awards'". NAACP. February 10, 2015.
  20. ^ "Claudia Rankine's 'exhilarating' poetry wins Forward prize", BBC News, September 29, 2015.
  21. ^ Tristram Fane Saunders, "Claudia Rankine wins £10,000 Forward prize with book of prose poems", The Telegraph, September 30, 2015.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Claudia Rankine.
External videos
video icon Interview w/Tavis Smiley, December 8, 2014; c. 15 minutes.
video icon Book Discussion on Citizen: An American Lyric, C-SPAN, April 19, 2015
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