LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), poet, children's fiction writer, memoirist, and educator, is one of the most popularly and critically acclaimed figures in American poetry. Her poems are compassionate, emotional and straightforward, and spring from her African roots and her personal history. Often using Black vernacular speech, she wrote on such traditional themes as family relationships, identity, love, religion, birth and death as informed by her experience of being an African American. Clifton also took on topics in American history and contemporary politics, such as slavery, AIDS, racism and terrorism. Her style tends towards minimalism and employs repetition, spare punctuation, puns, allusions, lower-case letters and elementary but evocative words. Proud of being both Black and a woman, Clifton affirmed life within difficult circumstances; strong in her belief that people can transform the world, she found examples of courage and endurance in her heritage that serve as models for contemporary readers.

Genre: Autobiographies and memoirs; Poetry

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The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 by Lucille Clifton
Combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.
Generations : a memoir by Lucille Clifton
Buffalo. A father's funeral. Memory. In Generations, Louise Clifton's formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, "born among the Dahomey people in 1822," who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author's grandmother. Lucille Clifton tells us about the life of an African-American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, of the death of her father and grandmother, but also of all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. "I look at my husband," Clifton writes, "and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones."

About Lucille Clifton

Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being by Kevin Quashie
Kevin Quashie analyzes texts by of Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Evie Shockley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others to argue for a black aliveness that is disarticulated from antiblackness and which provides the basis for the imagination and creation of a black world.
Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers by Sabrina Fuchs Abrams (Editor)
Focusing on the transgressive and transformative power of American female humorists, this title explores the work of authors and comediennes such as Carolyn Wells, Lucille Clifton, Mary McCarthy, Lynne Tillman, Constance Rourke, Roz Chast, Amy Schumer and Samantha Bee, and the ways in which their humor challenges gendered norms and assumptions through the use of irony, satire, parody, and wit. The chapters draw from the experiences of women from a variety of racial, class, and gender identities and encompass a variety of genres and comedic forms including poetry, fiction, prose, autobiography, graphic memoir, comedic performance, and new media.
Wild Blessings: the poetry of Lucille Clifton by Hilary Holladay
In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetic tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts -- personal, political, and literary -- as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific works: Clifton's poems about womanhood, a central concern throughout her career; her fertility poems, which are provocatively compared with Sylvia Plath's poems on the same subject; her relation to the Black Arts Movement and to other black female poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez; her biblical poems; her elegies; and her poignant family history, Generations, an extended prose poem. In addition to a new preface written after Clifton's death in 2010, this updated edition includes an epilogue that discusses the poetry collections she published after 2004.

African American Women Writers

More about Lucille Clifton at ProQuest One Literature

By Lucille Clifton

More by Lucille Clifton

About Lucille Clifton