Claudia Rankine is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She previously taught at Yale University, Pomona College, and Barnard College, among others. Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015) and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf Press, 2004); three plays, most recently HELP, which premiered at The Shed in March 2022, The White Card (Graywolf, 2019), which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/American Repertory Theater), and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her most recent publication, Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020), is a collection of poems and essays on race-related conversations she had with friends and strangers. Rankine is also the editor of several anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015). Since 2013, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Among her many other awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, United States Artists, National Endowment of the Arts, and MacArthur Foundation. With her 2016 MacArthur grant, Rankine co-founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, a New York-based “cultural laboratory” of social activists, writers, and artists exploring the subject of race.