Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican-born American poet and professor at Yale and then New York University whose Citizen: An American Lyric of 2014, in prose poems, images and essays, records the small daily encounters of racism, at the tennis court, the pharmacy, the dinner table, and the accumulation of their weight, and set beside them the deaths that became the news. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and was a finalist in criticism, the only book ever nominated in both. It is the newest book on the Columbia list, and the one that asks what a lyric is now.