Claudia Rankin - A Poet For Justice

Claudia Rankine's Commentary on Racism

I recently came across Claudia Rankine; a Jamaican who grew up in the USA, but in many ways remains Jamaican.  Claudia Rankine is among an elite group of poets shortlisted for the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for her celebrated poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric.

 This collection of prose poems, which examines the occurrence of racism in everyday life in the USA, has already accrued an impressive stack of awards and shortlists. The collection earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry (2015) and was the first book in the history of the award to have been shortlisted in two categories, having also been recognized as a work of cultural criticism. 

Claudia Rankin is the third Jamaican in recent times to receive international fame for their work in writing.  Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) became the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker prize while Kei Miller (The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion) took home the Forward prize last year. Citizen is also responsible for much of the attention to this current spate of Jamaican writers. 

Rankin’s other works include Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994).

For more on Claudia Rankine: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/claudia-rankine

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