Claudia Rankine and James Noël were named DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residents 2025 on July 11, 2024.
The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program has been awarded internationally highly regarded fellowships since 1963. Over 1000 outstanding international visual artists, authors, filmmakers, composers, and sound artists have been invited to live and work in Berlin. As part of its long-term support of artists, works by current and former guests are presented at the daadgalerie in Kreuzberg and partner institutions in Berlin, around Germany, and abroad. Some of the previous residents of this program have been Petina Gappah, Helon Habila, Binyavanga Wainaina, Niq Mhlongo, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Maaza Mengiste and many more. The residents for 2024 included Fiston Mwanza Mujila and Logan February.
After preselection by Sanaz Azimipoor, Ricardo Domeneck, Samir Sellami, the literature artists were selected by an expert panel of literary scholar Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque, poet and translator Christian Filips, literary scholar/editor Daniel Medin, Buch Basel head Marion Regenscheit, literary critic Deutschlandfunk Kultur Lara Sielmann, author Tomer Dotan Dreyfus.
The fellows for 2025 include the following writers of African descent;
- James Noël – James Noël is a Haitian poet, writer and actor. He writes in both French and Creole. Noël’s poems have been translated into several languages. He is the editor of a 2015 anthology of contemporary Haitian poetry, featuring 73 poets. In 2017, he published his first novel, Belle merveille.
- Claudia Rankine – Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine has coedited American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007), and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (2014). Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry (2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater. Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2014 she received a Lannan Literary Award. She has taught at the University of Houston, Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, and Pomona College.
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