Lucille Clifton

Thelma Lucille Sayles was born on the twenty-seventh of June 1936 at Depew, New York, the only daughter of Samuel L. Sayles — a millworker at the Bethlehem Steel plant at Lackawanna — and Thelma Moore Sayles, a homemaker who wrote poetry in private and would across her short life destroy the manuscripts she had completed. Her parents had migrated from Virginia and South Carolina to upstate New York in the 1920s. Her father, who had a fourth-grade education, owned over fifteen hundred books at his death; her mother, who had completed the sixth grade, recited from memory long passages of the Bible and of Edgar Allan Poe.

She attended the segregated Fosdick-Masten Vocational High School of Buffalo and entered Howard University on a scholarship in 1953 at sixteen — the youngest student in her cohort. She studied drama under Owen Dodson and the rest of her literature under Sterling Brown and Toni Morrison's (placed in this archive) Howard contemporaries. She left Howard in 1955 without completing the degree, transferred to the State University of New York at Fredonia, met Fred Clifton at Fredonia in 1955, married him in 1958, and across the following decades raised their six children alongside her writing.

She published her first collection — Good Times — in 1969. The volume was named by the New York Times one of the ten best books of 1969. She published across the following forty-one years thirteen further collections — including Good News About the Earth of 1972, An Ordinary Woman of 1974, Two-Headed Woman of 1980, Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 of 1991, The Book of Light of 1993, Blessing the Boats of 2000 (which won the National Book Award), and Mercy of 2004. She also wrote between 1970 and 1989 the twenty-volume Everett Anderson series of children's books — among the most widely-taught African American children's literature of the late twentieth century.

She served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985 — the first woman and the first African American to hold the post — and as Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland from 1989 to her death. In 2000 she was the first author in the history of the Pulitzer Prize to receive nominations for two volumes in successive years.

She died at Baltimore on the thirteenth of February 2010, at seventy-three.

She is honored here as the Maryland Poet Laureate.