Her father was a steelworker, her mother a laun-
dress and homemaker. Clifton was born with six
fingers on each hand, a trait she shared with her
mother and later with her daughter. This trait
becomes a significant motif in Clifton’s poetry.
Neither of Clifton’s parents finished elemen-
tary school; although her father could read, he
never learned to write. Her mother, on the other
hand, was a poet herself, producing verses in
traditional iambic pentameter. Life was not
pleasant in the Sayles household, even after
their move to Buffalo, New York, when Lucille
was seven years old. Her father was a womanizer
and was cruel to her mother, who also suffered
from epilepsy. In addition to Lucille, her
parents, and her younger brother, Sammy, the
family also included a daughter, Josie, from
Samuel Sayles’s first marriage and a daughter,
Elaine, born to Sayles and a neighbor woman a
few months after Lucille’s birth. Money was
tight, and Sayles drank, at times heavily. He
sexually molested Lucille, and this early abuse
is reflected in many of her later poems.
In 1953, Lucille left home to begin study at
Howard University as the recipient of a presti-
gious scholarship. While at Howard, she
encountered some of the finest minds of her
generation. Her professor, the noted poet Ster-
ling A. Brown, invited her to join a writers’
group that included James Baldwin, Owen Dod-
son, and Joe Walker, as well as Lucille’s friend
LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka). She
also became friends with fellow students Toni
Morrison, who would later win a Nobel Prize
in Literature, and Roberta Flack, who would
become a famous singer and composer.
Lucille left Howard in 1955 and attended
Fredonia State Teachers College briefly. While
at Fredonia, her friend Ishmael Reed introduced
her to a Buffalo State University student named
Fred James Clifton, an educator who later helped
to found the department of African American
studies at Harvard University. In 1958, the
young couple began a marriage that would flour-
ish through the births of six children in the first
seven years and last until Fred Clifton’s death of
cancer at age forty-nine in 1984. Sadly, Lucille
Clifton’s mother died in 1959 at age forty-four.
In 1967, the Clifton family moved to Balti-
more, Maryland, where Fred Clifton worked on
educational reform in the city’s schools. Mean-
while, Clifton herself continued to write poetry
and children’s books, just as she had during the
years in Buffalo. She longed to have a wider
audience for her work, however, and thus sent
some of her poems to Langston Hughes and
Robert Hayden, both highly regarded African
American poets. Hayden in turn showed the
poems to another important poet, Carolyn
Kizer, who in turn showed the poems to some
friends at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York
City, which sponsored one of the most presti-
gious writing contests in the country; as a result
of poets sharing Clifton’s work with other poets,
she ended up receiving the 1969 New York
Young Women’s and Young Men’s Poetry Dis-
covery Award. This award led to a reading in
New York attended by an editor from Random
House who asked Clifton to submit a manu-
script. The book becameGood Times, published
in 1969. In addition, Clifton also began her long
career as a writer of illustrated children’s books
withSome of the Days of Everett Horton.
During the next two decades, Clifton con-
tinued to produce both poetry and picture
books, and her work was included in several
prominent anthologies. She served as the poet
laureate of Maryland from 1975 to 1985.Gener-
ations, Clifton’s memoir, appeared in 1976. In
1980, her poetry collectionTwo-Headed Woman,
published by the University of Massachusetts
Press, won the Juniper Prize and was nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize. It was in this collection
that ‘‘homage to my hips’’ was first published.
In 1984, with the death of her beloved hus-
band, Clifton wrote the children’s bookEverett
Anderson’s Goodbye, a volume that won the
American Library Association’s Coretta Scott
King Award. Her 1987 publications,Nextand
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980
(including ‘‘homage to my hips’’), netted her
another Pulitzer nomination, as did her 1991
workQuilting. Clifton was named a Maryland
‘‘Living Treasure’’ in 1993; she was finalist for the
National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall
Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award,
all in 1996; and she won the Lifetime Achieve-
ment Award for Excellence from the Lannan
Foundation in 1996. She was also elected to the
Board of Chancellors of the Academy of Amer-
ican Poets and named a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. Clifton
won the National Book Award for Poetry for
Blessing the Boatsin 2000 and the Anisfield-
Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Cleveland Foundation in 2004.homage to my hips