Lucille Clifton wins poetry prize

At an ceremony held Wednesday night in Chicago, Buffalo area native Lucille Clifton accepted the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry from the Poetry Foundation. 

Clifton is the first African-American woman to receive the prestigious award in its 21 year history.

The three-person selection committee issued a statement that read in part: “ Her poems are local and funny, and have their own particular idiom; they speak big things in quiet ways, and she’s voracious in the subject matter she takes on, spanning city and country, speaking for the unspoken, the sacred, and the invisible. Clifton has added enormously to the representation of the African-American experience in poetry and has been a kind of historical consciousness for her people and a public consciousness for us all.”

Clifton was born in 1936 as Thelma Lucille Sayles into working class family in Depew. She was raised in Buffalo (her family lived on Purdy Street).

She is the author of 11 selections of poetry including Good Times (selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 1969), Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, and Next: New Poems (both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1988, marking the first time in history any author had two books selected as finalists in the same category for the award).

Clifton's Blessing The Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 won the National Book Award in 2000.

She and Fred Clifton married in 1958 and remained in Buffalo until 1960, when they moved to the Washington, D.C area. A long series of teaching appointments followed along with numerous literary awards. She was Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985

Clifton, who now lives in Columbia, Md., has also published more than 20 books of children's literature, most of them focusing on African-American history and stories about the black family. 

The Ruth Lilly Prize is administered by Poetry magazine and its parent organization The Poetry Foundation and carries with it a $100,000 cash award. Past winners include UB professor and Buffalo resident Carl Dennis.