Clifton, Lucille

Lucille Sayles Clifton is a major American poet, children's book author, and educator. Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936 and attended Howard University and Fredonia State Teacher's College. She married Fred Clifton in 1958, and the couple had six children. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Clifton's maternal poetry is important for its frank, accessible, and deceptively simple portrayal of an African American woman's experience as mother and daughter, and for its expression of a woman-centered history and spirituality. Like the work of Anne Sexton and Alicia Ostriker, Clifton's poetry features women's lives of body, mind, and spirit, and contributes to women poets' revisionist readings of the Bible.

Clifton's honors include grants from the National Endowment ...