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Keynote Speaker Biography

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. Her honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She has served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland and is currently Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Her books of poetry include:

• Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award
• The Terrible Stories (1995), which was nominated for the National Book Award
• The Book of Light (1993)
• Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991)
• Next: New Poems (1987)
• Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize;
• Two-Headed Woman (1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize
• An Ordinary Woman (1974)
• Good News About the Earth (1972)
• Good Times (1969).

She has also written Generations: A Memoir (1976) and more than sixteen books for children.

–from the Academy of American Poets