Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She earned her B.A. in English from Williams College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University.
She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004); PLOT (2001); The End of the Alphabet (1998); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.
John Lucas has worked as a documentary photographer for more than 20 years. He has directed and produced several cutting-edge multimedia projects and brought to "The Cooler Bandits" the experiences of nearly a quarter-century of social criticism in the arts. "The Cooler Bandits" is his first feature film.