ABOUT.  writing.  etc.

Camille Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, York Institute for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Tin House, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, jubliat, Poem-a-Day, American Poet, A Public Space, and elsewhere, along with several anthologies, including Please Excuse this Poem (Viking), African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Penguin Random House), and A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry (Copper Canyon Press). Her essays have been published by Copper Nickel, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, and Nat. Brut, and will appear in the book Black Poets on Craft, forthcoming from Knopf. The recipient of a Discovery Poetry Prize, she was featured as an emerging poet in O, The Oprah Magazine and as one of Brooklyn Magazine's top 100 cultural influencers, and was named an Honorary Fellow by Cave Canem Foundation, where she was also the Manager of External Relations & National Programs. In her many roles as a literary administator and advocate, she has work with numerous authors including Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, Ben Lerner, Ada Limón, Rita Dove, Ocean Vuong, Jericho Brown, Danez Smith, Saeed Jones, Eileen Myles, Cheryl Strayed, Ross Gay, and Terrance Hayes. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University's School of the Arts, she has taught at Columbia, Brown, NYU, UMASS Amherst, and The New School, and is currently an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. She hosts the podcast The Glimpse, and serves as co-chair for the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council.

Contact: camille@camillerankine.com.

“Fierce, beautiful, urgent, necessary. Dangerous stuff...This voice is news.”
    —A Voice to Be Reckoned With: Cornelius Eady on Camille Rankine, American Poet

“Camille Rankine says she never expects anything. But perhaps she should.”
    —Welcome to It: Profile by Kimberly Reyes for the Poetry Foundation