Lucille Clifton

Thelma Lucille Sayles was born on the twenty-seventh of June 1936 in Depew, New York, and reared in nearby Buffalo. She was a daughter of Samuel L. Sayles, a steelworker, and Thelma Moore Sayles, a laundress who quietly wrote verse of her own before family disapproval silenced her. From this working household — proud, close, and poor without being worn down by poverty — Lucille drew the ancestral memory and unshakable dignity that would run through all her work.

She attended Howard University on scholarship and later the State University of New York at Fredonia. In 1958 she married Fred J. Clifton, a philosopher and sculptor, and together they raised six children. Her first collection, "Good Times" (1969), was named by The New York Times among the best books of its year, announcing a spare, unadorned, deeply human voice unlike any other in American letters.

Clifton wrote in lowercase, in few words, of the Black body, of motherhood, of survival and joy. In 1988 she became the first author ever to have two volumes named Pulitzer Prize finalists in a single year. In 2000 she won the National Book Award for "Blessing the Boats." She served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985 and, in 2007, received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.

She died in Baltimore on the thirteenth of February 2010. Her poems endure as small, luminous acts of witness — telling the world, in her own words, to come celebrate with her that every day something has tried to kill her, and has failed. May her name be spoken with honor.