Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s first collection of poems, Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), won the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and her second collection, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press), was published in April 2009. Her work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattapallax, Shenandoah, the Women’s Review of Books, and other journals, as well as in anthologies Bum Rush the […]
I think first of thirst,— not the lighted sprays sprinkling domes of mist over the small pond in my gated community, but of skin— of black and white photographs, public drinking fountains labeled colored whites— of what my mother could quench in her time and what she could not touch. And of the phone […]
history has taught us much about fame and its inevitable tomorrow. —Lucille Clifton This is your fifteen minutes of fame. So violently sudden, it caught […]
I too have turned to the yard turning the yard into frustration of flowers I have felt for a knot in the soil coaxing pulling at bindweed roots pulling gently so they give half inch by half inch the vines wound silently violent round the necks of black […]
And Dinah the daughter of Leah which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.—Genesis 34:1 I grew up watching them cut their eyes, grit their teeth at each other. My aunt entering a […]
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), talks about the most pleasurable and the most painful aspects of writing for her.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), talks about the genesis of her poem, Poem for Amadou Diallo.