Divining Poets: Clifton

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), discovered by Langston Hughes, is renowned for writing lean and profound lines that explore strength over struggle, family life, and the Black experience. She was the first poet to have two of her collections selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. She also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2000, she won the National Book Award.Tracy K. Smith served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate. The author of four poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars and the memoir Ordinary Light, she is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and cotranslator (with Changtai Bi) of My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: SelectedPoems by Yi Lei. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Smith lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Praise for Lucille Clifton:"Lucille is a master of the epigram. Many of her best-loved poems . . . pack more emotional resonance into fewer lines than many novels achieve in hundreds of pages." —Harper's Bazaar"[Clifton] had an eye on the past, disrupting traditional tellings of American history to re-center the strength and creativity of Black women. . . . Clifton’s work was marked by her indelible style. She wrote short poems in entirely lowercase letters decades before it was a fad. Her sentences are economical; her punctuation thunders."—The Daily Californian"Clifton brings a complexity to something we imagined we understood — and a relentless honesty."—The New York Times"Lucille Clifton’s poetry, legendary for its sparseness of word and punctuation, spoke unflinchingly of personal hardship, the history of oppression and the human condition." —BillMoyers.com Praise for Tracy K. Smith:"Tracy K. Smith, former poet laureate, has a wonderful way with strange and haunting images that still manage to tell a resonant story." —Kwame Dawes, The Oregonian