Claudia Rankine

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Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (FENCE, 2015). In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Source

Excerpt from "Citizen” [Because white men can't]

Because white men can’t

police their imagination

black men are dying.

Published:

2014

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

Themes:

Police Brutality

Literary Devices:

Irony

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect

Juxtaposition

the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect