Jamican American Poet Michelle Cliff 1946

Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise.

Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a bisexual who grew up in Jamaica.

Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. She was educated at Wagner College and the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College and Emory University.

Cliff was a contributor to the Black feminist anthology Home Girls.

As of 1999, Cliff was living in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, poet Adrienne Rich. The two have been partnered since 1976.

Works

Fiction

• 1998: The Store of a Million Items (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company). Short stories
• 1993: Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (New York: Dutton). Novel
• 1990: Bodies of Water (New York: Dutton). Short stories
• 1987: No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Dutton). Novel (sequel to Abeng)
• 1985: Abeng (New York: Penguin). Novel

Prose poetry

• The Land of Look Behind and Claiming.
• 1980:Identity They Taught Me to Despise.

Editor

• 1982: Lillian Smith, The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings (New York: Norton).

Other

• 1982: "If I Could Write This in Fire I Would Write This in Fire", in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press).
• 1994: "History as Fiction, Fiction as History", Ploughshares Fall, 1994; 20(2-3): 196-202.
• 1990: "Object into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women's Artists," in Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute) pp. 271-290.

For further reading

• Cartelli, Thomas (1995) "After the Tempest: Shakespeare, Postcoloniality, and Michelle Cliff's New, New World Miranda," Contemporary Literature 36(1): 82-102.
• Edmondson, Belinda (1993) "Race, Writing, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff," Callaloo 16(1): 180-191.
• Lima, Maria Helena (1993) "Revolutionary Developments: Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Merle Collins's Angel," Ariel 24(1): 35-56.
• Lionnet, Francoise (1992) "Of Mangoes and Maroons: Language, History, and the Multicultural Subject of Michelle Cliff's Abeng," in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 321-345.
• Raiskin, Judith (1994) "Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of Sexual and Racial Identities," in Laura Doan, ed. The Lesbian Postmodern, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 156-172.
• Raiskin, Judith (1993) "The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff," Kenyon Review 15(1): 57-71.
• Schwartz, Meryl F. (1993) "An Interview with Michelle Cliff," Contemporary Literature 34(4): 595-619.