Lucille Clifton dies at 73; National Book Award-winning poet

Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award-winning poet and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. She was 73.

Clifton had been ill with an infection, her sister, Elaine Philip, told the Buffalo News. She had undergone surgery to remove her colon on Friday, but the exact cause of death remains undetermined.

In 2001, Clifton won the National Book Award for “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000.”

She was also the first black woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize award, in 2007, among the most prestigious awards that can be won by an American poet. It included a $100,000 stipend.

“I like the short, distinctive music that the poems make,” Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and one of the three judges who selected the winner, told the Baltimore Sun in 2007. “It’s admirable how simple and clear the surfaces are. But when you study her best poems, they keep opening into depths of complexity.”

Clifton, who published 11 poetry collections and more than 20 children’s books, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1988.

Thelma Lucille Sayles was born June 27, 1936, in Depew, N.Y., a small town outside Buffalo. Her mother, who wrote poetry, encouraged her creativity and she began to compose stories and poems as a child. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school and, in 1953, she won a scholarship to Howard University, where she majored in drama.

She left Howard after two years and in 1955 attended Fredonia State Teachers College in New York.

The poet and her husband, Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University at Buffalo, moved to Baltimore in the 1960s and had six children. He died in 1984.

Clifton was the second woman and the first African American to serve as poet laureate of Maryland, a position she held from 1979 to 1985. She also was poet-in-residence at Coppin State College from 1971 to 1974.

Besides her sister, Clifton is survived by her three daughters, a son and three grandchildren.

nick.madigan@baltsun.com