Claudia Rankine
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Claudia Rankine is an American poet born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston.
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[edit] Overview
Educated at Williams College and Columbia University, Rankine's work has appeared in many journals, including the Southern Review, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, and anthologies including On the Verge and Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (2000), in which she sounded this autobiographical note:
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 the 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. My second, The End of the Alphabet, makes a kaleidoscopic journey through the will to existence. 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." [1]
Winner of an Academy of American Poets fellowship, Rankine's recent work Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004) has been acclaimed for its unique blend of essay, lyric and TV imagery. She also co-edited (with Juliana Spahr) the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
[edit] Selected publications
- Nothing in Nature Is Private ( Cleveland State University Press, 1994 )
- The End of the Alphabet ( Grove Press, 1998 )
- Plot ( Grove Press, 2001 )
- Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric ( Graywolf Press, 2004 )
[edit] External links
- Poetry Center at Smith College site includes biographical material and poems
- Academy of American Poets site Her site includes an excerpt from Don't Let Me Be Lonely
- The First Person in the 21st Century Rankine's response to the "Symposium on Subjectivity and Style" @ Fence Magazine
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