A prolific poet and author is honored for her lifetime achievement.
Lucille Clifton is this year’s winner of the very prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. This is a prize with a $100,000 award, one of the largest literary prizes in the country. Lucille Clifton is a writer who certainly deserves it for her lifetime achievement as a poet and author.
Her first book of poetry, Good Times, was published in 1969 and declared by the New York Times as one of the year’s best books. Since then she has published at least a dozen poetry collections, numerous children’s books (including the Everett Anderson series), and a memoir. She has been a professor and poet-in-residence at many U.S. universities and colleges.
Clifton’s poetry reflects her love and respect for her African-American heritage, family, and the broader community. Her topics include African-American history, current events, women’s issues, indeed the whole spectrum of life’s experiences. Feelings of compassion and a sense of justice permeate her work.
Two of her poetry collections were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize--Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987) and Two-Headed Woman (1980). In 2000, she was honored with the National Book Award for her poetry collection Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (2000). Clifton has won numerous other awards--including an Emmy--and was Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979-1981).
In an interview with Hilary Holladay in 1998, Lucille Clifton said, “I have a poem that says something like, ‘the future is possible.’ I do believe that.”
