Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among many other honors. Rankine's work is distinguished by its experimental blending of genres and registers, mixing lyricism with social and literary criticism, visual composition, and other forms of expression. Rankine's boundary-crossing books are expanding both the definition of and the audience for poetry; Citizen was a New York Times bestseller in the "nonfiction" category, the only book of poetry ever to be so listed. In 2016, Rankine received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" for her body of "critical texts that are proving to be essential for understanding American life while also enriching the craft of poetry with a new sense of agency and urgency."