Emory Exhibits Writings of Poet Lucille Clifton

You could say that Lucille Clifton championed the underdog. As both a poet and a children’s book writer, she touched on themes that affected blacks, women and children.

Now you can get some insight into her writing through several exhibits hosted at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). The exhibits will feature rare unpublished poems, as well as some of the writer’s earliest children’s books, according to a press release.

The first exhibit, titled “come celebrate with me: The Work of Lucille Clifton,” opens Aug. 28 in the MARBL Gallery on Level 10 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Curated by Amy Hildreth Chen and Kevin Young, it features:

•  poems, from the first one she ever wrote in the 1950s to her last one in 2010
•  limited edition books
•  previously unseen photographs, from Clifton's childhood to her National Book Award win in 2000

The exhibit coincides with the release of “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010,” co-edited by Young, a poet and professor of English and creative writing at Emory as well as curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at MARBL. The book contains more than 700 pages of Clifton’s poems, including 62 unpublished poems — 27 from her early years of writing, and 35 from her later years until her death two years ago. The poems were found in Clifton’s papers, which MARBL acquired in 2006 and added to after her death.

A smaller companion exhibit of Clifton’s children’s books called “She Sang So Sweet: Lucille Clifton’s Children’s Literature,” curated by Chen, will run in the Corridor Gallery of Woodruff Library, near the main entrance on Level 2, beginning in mid-September. It will include one of Clifton’s first books and her unpublished compilation of jump-rope rhymes, which inspired the display’s title.

Clifton is known for her sparse style, avoiding capitalization and punctuation and using few words. She was the first person to have two books of poetry selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She also won numerous other awards, including an Emmy and National Book award. She was the poet laureate for Maryland from 1974 to 1985.

After a long battle with cancer, Clifton died in 2010, at the age of 73.

Kevin Young, co-editor of "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010," will join authors Jericho Brown, Sharan Strange and Dana Greene for a presentation on the life and poems of Clifton from 2:30-3:15 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 2 at the Decatur Conference Center Ballroom B. The event is part of the seventh annual Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival, Aug. 31-Sept. 2. Admission to all book festival events is free.