Claudia Rankine, an award-winning poet and past recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Award,” will join the faculty at New York University as a professor of creative writing. She will begin her tenure at NYU in the summer of 2021.
Professor Rankine is currently the Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University, where she has been since 2016. In 2015 Professor Rankine began her tenure as the Aerol Arnold Chair of English in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Earlier she was the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Professor Rankine is the author of several collections of poetry. In 2015, Professor Rankine made literary history when she was the first author to have a work nominated as a finalist in two categories in the 39-year history of the National Book Critics Circle Awards. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).
Professor Rankine is a native of Jamaica and moved to the United States at the age of 7. She is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she majored in literature. Professor Rankine holds a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Columbia University.
