Cheryl Clarke

Poet

Cheryl Clarke is the author of five books of poetry, Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women (Kitchen Table Press, 1982; digitized here, 2014); Living as a Lesbian (Firebrand, 1986/reprinted 2014 by Sinister Wisdom and Midsummer Night’s Presses), Humid Pitch (Firebrand, 1989), Experimental Love (Firebrand, 1993), and By My Precise Haircut (The Word Works Press, 2016); the critical study, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers Press, 2005), and her collected works The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006). With Steven G. Fulllwood, she co-edited To Be Left with the Body (2008), one of a series of communal publications produced by AIDS Project/LA and GMHC for black gay men, bisexual men, and men having sex with men. She served as an editor of Conditions (1981-1990), a feminist journal of writing with an emphasis on writing by lesbians. Since 1979, her writing has appeared in many publications, among them the iconic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (eds. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherríe Moraga, 1982) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (ed. Barbara Smith, 1984). Since 2013, she has served as one of the organizers of the annual Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, N.Y., the Book Village of the Catskills.