Purchase College-SUNY has announced that Claudia Rankine, the critically-acclaimed and bestselling poet, will be the college’s 2016-17 Roy and Shirley Durst Distinguished Chair in Literature. The college will present “A Reading and Conversation with Claudia Rankine”. The author of five collections of poetry, Claudia Rankine's most recent book, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the NAACP Image Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry.