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Author of Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and earned a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University. Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2015, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in both poetry and criticism. She works in formally hybrid texts combining poetry, prose, and images. Rankine received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and founded the Racial Imaginary Institute in 2017. She is a professor of creative writing at New York University.