Lucille
Clifton (1936-2010) was the 2007 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as the 2010 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Her final poetry collection, Voices, was published by BOA in September 2008. She was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and author of
children's books. Her poetry book, Blessing
the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, won the 2000
National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton's BOA poetry
collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980,
and, Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the
Pulitzer Prize in 1988, the only author ever to have done so,
while The Terrible Stories was a finalist
for the 1996 National Book Award.
Clifton received fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts; an Emmy Award from the
American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; the Shelley
Memorial Prize; and the Charity Randall Citation. She served as
a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College
in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The
Academy of American Poets in 1999.
The landmark collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA, 2012) is available in the BOA Bookstore.
