Claudia Rankine is the author of five books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely- An American Lyric and the bestselling Citizen- An American Lyric. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the winner of many prizes including the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship. She is an adjunct professor of English and African-American Studies at Yale University, and has previously taught at Pomona College and the University of Southern California.
"Claudia Rankine marshalls the full range of her substantial talents - from poetry to essay - to explore how racism is lived, privilege is expressed and engagement might be possible. Personal, political, interrogative and, most all, impressive -- Gary Younge This brilliant and multi-layered work is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness . . . bold and vital -- Judith Butler In my work, well-meaning white people consistently ask me how to recognize racism. Yet we might ask, ""How have we managed not to know?"" The information is everywhere, if we care to listen . . . With clarity and grace, Claudia Rankine delivers a gut punch to white denial. Just Us is stunning work - audacious, revelatory, devastating -- Robin DiAngelo In Just Us, Claudia Rankine continues her remarkable and brilliant interrogation of the language, culture, and history that have shaped America, forging through poems, essays, and documents a literary archive that is utterly original and desperately needed -- Dinaw Mengestu Fiercely intimate, rigorous . . . [Just Us] lets all of us in on the conversations - with others and the self - that are necessary for survival -- Nuar Alsadir"