Claudia Rankine: Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine
earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia
University.
Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including
Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Nothing in
Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry
Prize. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise
movements of mind. Noting that "hers is an art neither of epiphany
nor story," critic Calvin Bedient observed that "Rankine's style is
the sanity, but just barely, of the insanity, the grace, but just
barely, of the grotesqueness." Discussing the borrowed and
fragmentary sources for her work in an interview with Paul Legault
for the Academy of American Poets, Rankine stated, "I don't feel
any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the
making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth."
With Juliana Spahr, Rankine co-edited American Women Poets in the
21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) and, with Lisa
Sewell, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007).
Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American
Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry
(2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American
Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New
York's Foundry Theater.
Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American
Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan
Foundation. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets. She has taught at the University of Houston,
Barnard College, and Pomona College.
Beth Loffreda:
Beth Loffreda is a nonfiction writer and the author of Losing Matt
Shepard: life and politics in the aftermath of anti-gay murder. She
directs the MFA program in creative writing and teaches for
American Studies at the University of Wyoming. She lives in
Laramie, Wyoming.
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