In a Christian Century review of Clifton’s work, Peggy Rosenthal wrote, “The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. Her writing covered countless subjects in important ways, leading her poetry to be read by people with a wide variety of backgrounds and interests.Ĭlifton is noted for saying much with few words. Mary’s College of Maryland and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Clifton was a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. In addition to her numerous poetry collections, she wrote many children’s books.
She served as the state of Maryland’s poet laureate from 1974 until 1985, and won the prestigious National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000. Her collection Two-Headed Woman (1980) was also a Pulitzer nominee and won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts. Awarding the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize to Clifton in 2007, the judges remarked that “One always feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton’s poems-it is a moral quality that some poets have and some don’t.” In addition to the Ruth Lilly prize, Clifton was the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987) and Next: New Poems (1987). A prolific and widely respected poet, Lucille Clifton’s work emphasizes endurance and strength through adversity, focusing particularly on African-American experience and family life. She was discovered as a poet by Langston Hughes (via friend Ishmael Reed, who shared her poems), and Hughes published Clifton's poetry in his highly influential anthology, The Poetry of the Negro (1970). She studied at Howard University, before transferring to SUNY Fredonia, near her hometown. Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 in DePew, New York, and grew up in Buffalo.
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