Claudia Rankine (Kingston, 1963) is a Jamaican poet, essayist and playwright. She is a member of the Academy of American Poets, of which she was named rector in 2013. her work Her Citizen. An American lyricist, a testament to the individual and collective consequences of racism, has won major awards including the PEN/Open Book Award, the PEN Award for Literature, the NAACP Image Awards, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. National Book Critics). It was the first book to be nominated in both the poetry and criticism categories.