Writer, editor, and poet Michelle Cliff (1946-2016) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Jamaica and the United States. She earned a bachelor’s at Wagner College and did her graduate work at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. In her writing, Cliff slips between genres - combining memoir, history, and criticism in explorations of racism, homophobia, identity, and landscape.
Cliff published two volumes of prose poetry: Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980) and The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985). Her nonfiction includes the memoir/criticism volume If I Could Write This in Fire (2008). Her novels include Abeng (1985), Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (1993), and Into the Interior (2010). Cliff also edited The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith (1978). During the 1980s, she served on the editorial board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and was published in numerous feminist and black, feminist anthologies. After serving as an editor for Norton, Cliff was the Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She was the life partner of poet Adrienne Rich.
