Jamaica- born Claudia Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.and the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, PLOT, The End of the Alphabet, and Nothing in Nature is Private, which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. She is a winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the National Endowments for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2006, she served as a Judge for the National Book Award for Poetry.

A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Rankine has edited numerous anthologies including American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics. Her plays include Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue and she has also produced a number of videos in collaboration with John Lucas, including “Situation One.”