Claudia Rankine, the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Yale, has been named a 2016 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow.
“Claudia Rankine is a poet illuminating the emotional and psychic tensions that mark the experiences of many living in twenty-first-century America. Over the course of five poetry collections, Rankine has adopted different forms of poetic expression that correspond to the trajectory of her concerns from the private to the public. Rankine’s abstract and broken syntax in The End of the Alphabet (1998) dramatizes the speaker’s struggle to find language commensurate with her grief. In Plot (2001), interwoven fragments of lyric verse, dialogue, and prose register the disruptions to identity and artistic production that arise with pregnancy and motherhood.” (from the MacArthur Foundation)
Read more about Claudia Rankine at MacArthur Foundation website.