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 for the Arts and the 2007 Ruth Lily Poetry Prize. Between 1979 and 1985, Clifton served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland. Two of her 11 poetry books were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 196980 (1987), and Next: New Poems (1987). Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 (2000) won the National Book Award for Poetry.

Clifton's maternal poems show a vast thematic and tonal range compressed into a spare style. In “Poem in Praise of Menstruation,” “Poem to My Uterus,” and “To My Last Period,” Clifton responds to the inconveniences, sorrows, and profundities of a woman's reproductive cycle, but she closes the sequence with “wishes for sons,” which humorously imagines young men menstruating.

Other poems are known for their powerful maternal affect: “The Lost Baby Poem” speaks to the loss of a child to abortion or miscarriage. “Mercy” includes elegies for two of Clifton's children who died as young adults.

Clifton's work conjures strength from African American history and spirituality, particularly in Two-Headed Woman. Generations: A Memoir provides background for poems like “Ca'line's Prayer,” told in the voice of Clifton's paternal great-great-grandmother, who maintained the spirit of Dahomey women through her experience as a slave.

Clifton also draws spiritual power from her maternal ancestry in poems like “Daughters,” but she reflects a complex spiritual relationship with her mother, Thelma Moore Sayles (1914–59), in several elegies. Biblical revisions appear frequently in Clifton's work, and offer transformative readings of mothers in the Bible, from the Mary poems in Good Woman to “The Tree of Life” sequence featuring Eve and Lucifer in Quilting, to “Sarah's Promise” and “Naomi Watches While Ruth Sleeps” in The Book of Light.