About Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton (birth name Thelma Lucille Sayles) was born June 27, 1936 in Depew, Erie County, New York and died February 13, 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland. She was an African-American poet and writer, best known for her 2000 anthology Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems which received the National Book Award for Poetry.She published her first volume of poetry, Good Times, in 1969. The Mother of Six went on to write some of the days of Everett Anderson in 1970, All Us Come Cross the Water in 1973, My Friend Jacob (1980), Everett Anderson's Goodbye (1983) and Three Wishes (1992) also she wrote her memoir entitled Generations: A Memoir (1976).
She also published numerous other volumes of poetry such as Good News About the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), Two-Headed Woman (1980), Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969-1980 (1987 ), Next: New Poems (1987), Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991) and The Book of Light (1993). She was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby in London and New York in 1992.
In 1999, while she was a guest writer at Columbia University between 1995 and 1999, she authored the volume of poetry Poems Seven, for which she received the prestigious National Book Award for Poetry in 2000. She was also a professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. She was also a professor of liberal arts at St. Mary's College in Maryland. In 1999 she was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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