voraciously, and Lucille’s mother wrote poetry in
iambic pentameter. Although it was very different
from the sort of verse Clifton would go on to write,
her mother’s writing nevertheless provided an im-
portant example for the future poet.
Clifton was not only the first in her family to
graduate from high school but also the first to
attend college. Poor grades cost her the scholar-
ship she received from Howard University, how-
ever, and her subsequent enrollment at Fredonia
State Teachers’ College lasted but a few months.
Although she would later become a professor of
creative writing and eventually hold a chaired
professorship at St. Mary’s College of Maryland,
Clifton chafed at the restrictions placed on her as
a student and chose to pursue her education on
her own.
In 1958 she married Fred Clifton, who was
completing his senior year at the University of
Buffalo. The couple lived in Buffalo for about a de-
cade while Fred, a yogi with wide-ranging philo-
sophical interests, pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy
at the university. Lucille, who worked for the first
several years of her marriage as a claims clerk for
the New York State employment office, had six
children between 1961 and 1967. All the while, she
was writing poems, with an eye toward someday
publishing them.
For Clifton, 1969 proved to be a professional
turning point. After the poet ROBERT HAYDEN re-
ceived a letter and sample poems from Clifton,
he shared the poems with the poet Carolyn Kizer,
who entered the poems in the YW-YMCA Poetry
Center Discovery Award competition. By now
Fred and Lucille Clifton were living in Baltimore,
where Fred was educational coordinator for the
Model Cities Program and Lucille worked for the
U.S. Office of Education. Clifton did not know
that she was entered in the contest, so her selec-
tion as the winner came as a surprise. The Discov-
ery Award drew the attention of Random House,
which then published her first book, Good Times
(1969), as well as two subsequent poetry collec-
tions and her memoir.
In brief, often elegiac poems about urban black
life, Good Times demonstrated clarity of style and
an incisive social awareness that would become
hallmarks of Clifton’s poetry. The New York Times
named the volume one of 10 notable books of- This was the same year, coincidentally, that
Clifton published the first of some two dozen pic-
ture books for children. No longer a civil servant
who wrote on the side, she was now managing two
professional writing careers.
Clifton followed her debut poetry success with
Good News about the Earth (1972), a book reflect-
ing the activist spirit of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT.
As the women’s movement gathered momentum
in the 1970s, an increasingly self-confident and
self-consciously female persona took shape in
her poems as well as in her memoir, Generations
(1976). In An Ordinary Woman (1974) and Tw o -
Headed Woman (1980), a feminist spirituality
surges through her poems. Her private spiritual
experiences—notably her supernatural communi-
cations with her deceased mother—became cen-
tral to her vision of the world.
After the publication of Two-Headed Woman,
however, Clifton did not publish another poetry
book for seven years. Important changes in her
life—the death of her husband at age 49 in 1984
and a move to California in order to teach at the
University of California at Santa Cruz—no doubt
contributed to this quiet period. In 1987 she re-
emerged with the publication of Next, a bold col-
lection of elegiac poems, and Good Woman: Poems
and Memoir, 1969–1980, a compilation of her first
four poetry volumes and memoir. In 1988, she pub-
lished a limited-edition chapbook, Ten Oxherding
Pictures. Around the same time, she returned to
Maryland and began teaching at St. Mary’s Col-
lege, where she has held a position ever since.
The books she would write in the next decade
reveal that her spirituality and mortality were now
the definitive core around which her poetry re-
volved. Between 1991 and 2000, despite bouts with
breast cancer and kidney failure, she published
four volumes of poetry: Quilting (1991), The Book
of Light (1993), The Terrible Stories (1996), and
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–
2000 (2000). More and more, she was able to use
her own life experience as a template for medita-
tions on social injustice, African-American history,
and the innate strength of womanhood.
Clifton, Lucille Sayles 109