Two Women Professors Win National Book Critics Circle Awards

Marilynne Robinson, the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop of the University of Iowa, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for her novel Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). The novel is third book in a series about a family in small town Iowa. The first book in the series Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), won the Pulitzer Prize.

Professor Robinson is a native of Idaho. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington.

Claudia Rankine, the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). Rankine’s poetry recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Citizen is her fifth published poetry collection.

Earlier this year, Professor Rankine made literary history when she was the first author to have a work nominated as a finalist in two categories in the 39-year history of the National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Professor Rankine is a native of Jamaica. She is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and holds a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Columbia University.