Lucille Clifton

Who Was Lucille Clifton?

Lucille Clifton was one of the most important American poets of the second half of the twentieth century — a writer whose work combined formal compression, spiritual depth, and unflinching engagement with the experience of Black womanhood in a voice that is entirely her own. Born in Depew, New York, in 1936, she grew up in a working-class family and attended Howard University before transferring to Fredonia State Teachers College.

Her poetry is characterized by a refusal of capitalization and conventional punctuation, a compression that packs enormous weight into very small spaces, and a consistent engagement with the body, with survival, with Biblical figures reimagined from unexpected angles, and with the specific experience of being a Black woman in America. She was Poet Laureate of Maryland, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the National Book Award.

Clifton is significant for TLA because her poetry is explicitly and unselfconsciously theological. She writes to and about God, to and about Biblical figures, from the position of a woman who has survived things that should have destroyed her and who finds in that survival a form of praise. Her poem “won’t you celebrate with me” is one of the most compressed and most moving statements of the theology of survival in American poetry.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Good Times — 1969
• An Ordinary Woman — 1974
• Two-Headed Woman — 1980
• Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir — 1987
• The Book of Light — 1993
• Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems — 2000 — National Book Award
• Mercy — 2004