2016 2016: UMass Dartmouth welcomes renowned poet Claudia Rankine April 25

Highly acclaimed poet to read from award winning works as part of University’s celebration of National Poetry Month

UMass Dartmouth will welcome acclaimed poet Claudia Rankine to campus on April 25, at 4 p.m. at the University’s Woodland Commons, for a public reading and book signing of her award winning works. This visit by the nationally celebrated poet is part of a series of events organized by UMass Dartmouth’s College of Arts & Sciences in celebration of National Poetry Month. Claudia Rankine will read from her book Citizen: An American Lyric, which in addition to her other well-known volume of poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, will be on sale at the event.

Citizen received the PEN Open Book Award and the PEN Literary Award, the NAACP Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Citizen is a finalist for the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.

Her other volumes of poetry include Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, PLOT, The End of the Alphabet, andNothing in Nature is Private, which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. She has also written two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.

Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Claudia Rankine earned her Bachelor of Arts at Williams College, and she earned her Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University. She lives in California and is the Aerol Arnold Chair in the University of Southern California English Department.