The USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has recruited renowned American poet Claudia Rankine as holder of the Aerol Arnold Chair of English. She will teach a wide variety of literature and creative writing courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level starting in fall 2016. Known for her commitment to social justice and her poetic innovations, as well as an incisive intelligence and wry humor, Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry and two plays and has become a sought-after speaker at colleges and universities across America. Born in Jamaica, Rankine attended Catholic schools in the Bronx and then went to Williams College in Massachusetts, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in literature in 1986. From there she went to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, where she earned an MFA in poetry in 1993. Rankine’s most recent book, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in March and the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. In 2014, she was a National Book Award finalist for Citizen and was honored with the Lannan Literary Award, the $50,000 Jackson Prize in Poetry, awarded by Poets and Writers, the 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters: Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, the 2015 PEN Open Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work — Poetry. Rankine comes to USC Dornsife from Pomona College in Claremont, where she was Henry G. Lee Professor of English. She has also taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland; Barnard College in the city of New York; the University of Georgia; the University of Houston; and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her work Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a meditation on death, has been acclaimed for its unique blend of poetry, essay, lyric and television imagery. Her other collections of poetry include Nothing in Nature Is Private, The End of the Alphabet and PLOT. Her play, The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, was a 2011 Distinguished Development Project Selection in the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. Rankine wrote Existing Conditions With Casey Llewellyn, a three-act play commissioned by the Mellon Foundation and Haverford College and performed in 2010. In 2013, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.