Claudia Rankine is the author of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric”; “Nothing in Nature Is Private”; and “Citizen: An American Lyric,” which was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Center USA Poetry Award. Her most recent collection of essays and poems, “Just Us: An American Conversation” (Graywolf), explores the history of racism and white privilege in the United States. Rankine has also written the plays “Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue,” “The White Card” and “HELP.” She is a MacArthur Fellow and the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale.