Lucille Clifton Research Paper

My name is Lucille Clifton, but my birth name is Thelma Lucille Sayles.
I was born on June 27th 1936 in New York to Samuel and Thelma Moore Sayles, and later died at the age of 73 on February 13th 2010.
My parents never had the best education, but they supported me nonetheless in my own education, and after I received my high-school diploma, I went to study at Harvard university. Sadly, I was kicked out due to bad grades and had to continue my college career at Fredonia State Teacher’s College.
After my successful college years, I became a well-known writer, poet, and teacher. My inspiration for writing came from the times that I lived through, mostly from the major social changes that were happening in the US from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.
During my childhood, racial segregation, sexism, and discrimination in general were apparent in my

every-day life, but the many African-American politicians and activists who were fighting for our rights, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks inspired me to join the fight for our rights by writing about being an African-American and a woman in the US, while questioning society’s discrimination and intolerance of certain ethnic groups.
As for my career in general, I was the poet in residence at Cappin State College from 1971 to 1974, the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and from 1985 to 1989, I taught writing and creative Writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

My 1st book of poetry – Good Times, published in 1969 was names as one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York times in 1969, and talked about the small joys of being an African-American family in poverty. In this selection, I had a special writing style, and I removed all punctuation and Capitalization from my poems while only using simple words and short phrases. I used this style to write my poems to focus the reader’s attention on the importance of the words that I used and their meaning.
Another one of my major works was the Everett Anderson children’s book series. The books revolved around the life of a young African-American boy named Everett Anderson, and each book would teach the reader a small lesson about life. The main purpose of these books was to teach young children about ethnicity and cultural identity, while showing them that discrimination was

bad.
One of my more important poem selections was “Blessing the Boats” that I published in 2000, which also won the National Book Award. In this collection, I wrote my poems in the same way as my other selection, and the main difference between them was that in Blessing the Boats I wrote only about the issues present in society, such as racism, sexism, and bigotry.
My life work was to fight against all discrimination through my writing about African-American culture, both historically and in the US, problems in society and the small joys of life that remain untouched by poverty.
To summarize the theme of my career, I once said: