The Office of the President presents “Nurturing the Compassionate Community: An Evening to Honor the Legacy of Lucille Clifton” on Monday, February 28 at 7:30 p.m. on Zoom. The annual event, co-sponsored by the VOICES Reading Series, will feature poetry readings and reflections to honor the late Lucille Clifton, former distinguished professor of the humanities at St. Mary’s College.
Carolyn Forché and Raymond Antrobus will perform original works of poetry. Antrobus will receive the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award during the event.
Forché’s first volume, “Gathering the Tribes,” winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by “The Country Between Us,” “The Angel of History,” and “Blue Hour.” Her most recent collection is “In the Lateness of the World.” She is also the author of the memoir “What You Have Heard Is True” (Penguin Random House, 2019), a lyrical and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards.
She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, “Against Forgetting,” has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.
Antrobus is the author of “All the Names Given” (Tin House, 2021), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Costa Poetry Award. His debut collection, “The Perseverance” (Tin House, 2021), won the Ted Hughes Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others. Born in London, Raymond is currently based between London and New Orleans.
Lucille Clifton was one of the most distinguished, decorated, and beloved poets of her time. She won the National Book Award for Poetry and was the first Black recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Her honors and awards give testament to the universality of her unique and resonant voice. In 1987, she became the first author to have two books of poetry – “Good Woman” and “Next” – chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. She was named a Literary Lion of New York Public Library in 1996, served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poetry and was elected a fellow in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
To register for this Zoom webinar, go to http://www.smcm.edu/
