Liturgies of Survival: Honoring Lucille Clifton

Liturgies of Survival: Honoring Lucille Clifton is an intimate gathering where Clifton's poetry is treated as sacred text that holds people alive. Come bearing witness to a poet whose words have found their way into the cracks of people's lives and refused to leave. Come with what you're surviving. Come with what you're celebrating. Whether you've carried Clifton's poems for years or are hearing her name for the first time, there is a place for you in this room.

Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 in DePew, New York, and grew up in Buffalo. She studied at Howard University, before transferring to SUNY Fredonia, near her hometown. She was discovered as a poet by Langston Hughes (via friend Ishmael Reed, who shared her poems), and Hughes published Clifton's poetry in his highly influential anthology, The Poetry of the Negro (1970). A prolific and widely respected poet, Lucille Clifton’s work emphasizes endurance…