Citizen: An American Lyric
Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine, is SJSU's Campus Reading book for the fall 2021 incoming class of first-year students. Citizen is an innovative work of prose and poetry, words and images; it addresses racial aggressions in our daily lives, and encourages us to reflect on racial inequalities through a personal, professional, and artistic lens. Citizen was the Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
To learn more about the author and book, visit the Citizen and Claudia Rankine website.
Author Bio 
Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (FENCE, 2015). In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
- Biography from Claudia Rankine's website
