Lucille Clifton Goes Home

from The Buffalo News

Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies

by Jay Rey

Lucille Clifton, born and raised in the Buffalo area before going on to achieve some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died this morning at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73, her sister told The Buffalo News.

Clifton had been ill for some time with some type of infection, and had undergone surgery to remove her colon Friday, but her exact cause of death is still uncertain, Clifton's sister, Elaine Philip said today.

"We really don't know," Philip said, "she had an infection throughout her body, and we don't know yet where it was coming from."

Clifton, who lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state, was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000," and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation."

"She is, in my opinion, the greatest poet to have been born and raised in Buffalo in the 20th Century," said R.D. Pohl, longtime literary contributor to The Buffalo News.

"I think so, too," Philip said, "not just because she was my sister. She was so sensitive. Everything touched her. Everyone mattered to her. She was such a loving person."

The former Lucille Sayles was born into a working-class family in Depew on June 27, 1936.

She moved to Buffalo with her family at an early age, and was raised on Purdy Street. She graduated from Fosdick-Masten High School and was awarded a scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., before she transferred to Fredonia State College, where she graduated.

Clifton left Buffalo in the late 1960s, after she met and married Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University at Buffalo.

The couple moved to Baltimore and had six children. Clifton moved to California for a short time, after her husband died in 1984, but returned to Maryland several years later and has been there ever since.

In 2004, she returned to Buffalo to receive an Outstanding Individual Artist award from the Arts Council in Buffalo and Erie County and the Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

At that time, Clifton had published 11 poetry collections, autobiographical prose and 20 children's books. Her poems have appeared in more than 100 anthologies. In 1987, she became the only author to have had two books nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year and was a finalist for the prestigious award.

Besides her sister, Clifton is survived by three daughters, Sidney, Gillian and Alexia; and a son, Graham.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.