https://www.skrancy.com/writing daily 0.75 2026-03-23 https://www.skrancy.com/contact daily 0.75 2024-01-25 https://www.skrancy.com/press daily 0.75 2023-04-04 https://www.skrancy.com/dreams-of-diaspora daily 0.75 2026-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62280ceaae3dc31e8ad565fc/5372a07c-b1af-432c-843b-7a9f610fc1a0/Rancy_SK_COV-EM.jpg Dreams of Diaspora - Cover art courtesy of Edouard Duval-Carrié DREAMS OF DIASPORA Full-length poetry collection (Release date: March 17, 2023 from Finishing Line Press) Confronting the fragmented narratives of slavery and colonization in the Caribbean, DREAMS OF DIASPORA grapples with questions of place, belonging, and identity of the dispossessed. In scales both intimate and epic, probing the region's revolutionary and literary legacies, these poems wander the seas of the Americas, centering the roles of class, race, economics, and history in the decimation of Haiti and the migration of peoples around the globe. At once eulogy and song, DREAMS OF DIASPORA forges a new understanding of self for the Caribbean's decolonized, reframing what it means to be home. ORDER HERE Finishing Line Press | Amazon ADVANCE PRAISE Dexterous and commanding, Dreams of Diaspora is a love song to those who move across oceans and borders, celebrating the revolutionary traditions of the Americas while acknowledging the ways in which the region is still marked by colonialism. Rancy recognizes the Black diaspora as an important vantage point, one that allows us to see in many directions, including the ancestral past and a decolonized future. With language both searing and delicate, Dreams of Diaspora is revelatory and prescient. — Desiree C Bailey, author of WHAT NOISE AGAINST THE CANE, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and National Book Awards Finalist S.K. Rancy's exquisite poem-explosions are so many wide-open windows onto the contradictions of a deeply diasporic Black American life. Full at once with fury and with hope, these are stories told by one who knows and feels this country intimately, but still sits / sits still just outside its subtle borders – living, observing at a distance not-quite-safe. To read Rancy's words is to sit with him and feel, too, how the spiral of shared history simmers beneath every moment of our divided present. His work is a gentle proposition for healing in a reimagined time-space of home. — Kaiama L. Glover, PhD, author; translator; co-editor; Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College of Columbia University; and awardee of PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation Dreams of Diaspora undoes Ralph Ellison’s borrowed phrase “I yam what I yam”. Here, a Black man knows himself and his ancestry, and he knows that his people can fly. These poems live urgently and always through exquisite music—I shutter between many subjects, not the least of which are the Black/immigrant experience, Fanon, Odysseus, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This book sirens me to walk barefoot on flooded asphalt, somewhere between my past and present. Dreams of Diaspora montages within my mind—I want to dream onward. — CM Burroughs, Professor of Poetry at Columbia College Chicago and author of MASTER SUFFERING, longlisted for the National Book Award, and THE VITAL SYSTEM Dreams of Diaspora is an evocative and wide-ranging exploration of the dreams of the past and present of the black Atlantic diaspora shaped by the history and trauma of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the Americas. Written in taut yet rich poetic language, this collection of poems is in deep conversation with an essential lineage of Caribbean intellectuals and writers, including Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, among others. While Rancy’s collection has strong roots in the Caribbean, particularly in Haiti and its revolutionary history, it traces a broader Caribbean diasporic trajectory that makes home in “La Florida” and finds its way to Brooklyn, New York…. These Caribbean dislocations emerge out of a history of exile, violence, and imperialism that cannot be forgotten, as these poems insist, and deftly connect to present-day racism and anti-black police violence in the U.S. and ongoing economic dependence and inequality in the Caribbean… S.K. Rancy’s Dreams of Diaspora takes us from the past to the present and back, from Jacmel to Flatbush Avenue, giving an urgent Caribbean diasporic poetic voice to those “still begging to be free.” — Maja Horn, PhD, Professor of Spanish & Latin American Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University https://www.skrancy.com/selfportrait-in-hospital-as-camus daily 0.75 2026-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62280ceaae3dc31e8ad565fc/30e90be4-639a-4d65-8f46-1e6d49de31ff/SELF-PORTRAIT+IN+HOSPITAL+AS+CAMUS.jpg Self-Portrait in Hospital as Camus SELF-PORTRAIT IN HOSPITAL AS CAMUS Poetry chapbook, winner of the 2022 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize (Release Date: April 1, 2023) Mediating on the absurd, the existential, and the sincere, the poems in SELF-PORTRAIT IN HOSPITAL AS CAMUS struggle with the futility of scientific and philosophical tenets of objectivity as framed by human suffering within the hospital’s walls. In vacillating between praising the wonder of human anatomy and scientific discovery while decrying the senselessness of man’s achievements and ambitions in the face of a meaningless and finite existence, this collection reaches its crescendo in the only reasonable apotheosis: if nothing matters, everything must. Order here. ADVANCE PRAISE “In the long line of physician-poets, this debut collection carries the freshest and most overtly philosophical voice, by turns gently surrealist, painfully realistic and stringently post-modernist. Rancy’s poems take on shapes as narrow as an Arizona string-tie and as broad as a prose poem dressed as a surgeon’s operative report. Their tone is as experimental as Rae Armantrout, as mischievous as Bolaño and as tender as Kay Ryan. They will entertain you and some will keep you up at night.” — Michael Salcman, M.D., editor of Poetry in Medicine and author of Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020) https://www.skrancy.com/beyond-the-baths-of-stars daily 1.0 2026-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62280ceaae3dc31e8ad565fc/5917ab6d-f152-461b-afc5-7085cf189b19/Rancy_BeyondtheBathsofStars_PB+%281%29.jpg Beyond the Baths of Stars - Artwork courtesy of Bony Ramirez BEYOND THE BATHS OF STARS Forthcoming from Amistad / HarperCollins 11/3/26. Pre-order here. A dazzling literary debut that reimagines The Odyssey and asks what power do we have to control our own fate when destiny feels pre-determined and the systems of the world are broken? Eurick Ulysse is irrevocably trapped: by poverty, by class, and by his immigrant parents’ expectations. Disillusioned by dead-end jobs, unaffordable college aspirations, and the doldrums of his South Florida hood, he resolves to piss his life away getting drunk with his friends on the beach. But the night Eurick drags a delirious and half-drowned Ana María Cortez out of the sea, everything changes. Carefree, unconventional, and well-to-do, Ana comes from another world. She invites Eurick and his friends out on a wild joyride through the Miami streets, a night replete with casino runs, boat thefts, and strange surreal encounters. Soon, Eurick finds himself rebelling against every constraint that’s ever held him back. It isn’t long before he realizes just how trapped he is, growing more and more desperate to do whatever it takes to escape. Will one night of freedom allow Eurick to see another kind of life for himself? Or will it show him a future that remains forever out of reach? https://www.skrancy.com/home-1 daily 0.75 2026-03-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/62280ceaae3dc31e8ad565fc/ad22cedf-e8b1-4aa2-b125-a7137fc1c619/SCHNEIDER_IMG_2937.jpg About me Photo credit: Jemille Rancy