Claudia Rankine
Poet of the Everyday Racial Encounter
I write the world as it is, line by line.
I was born in Kingston and raised in New York, and I have spent my life listening closely to what America doesn’t say aloud. I teach at Yale, but my real lessons come from the everyday: a glance, a remark, a body on a tennis court. In my books, like *Citizen*, I gather these fragments and shape them into language that refuses to look away. My work sits between poetry, art, and witness. I believe in the exact word. I believe in the silence between them.
What I'm Into: the weight of a glance, text as evidence, Serena Williams, visual art that speaks back, tea, sharp and black
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