LISTEN to my June 21st, 2022 WIOX show featuring Cheryl Clarke, remarkable poet, activist, educator and co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills. Planet Poet’s intrepid Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the show!
Season 4 Episode 8
Cheryl Clarke - Poet, Activist
LISTEN to Season 4 Episode 8 on Spotify
CHERYL CLARKE is a black lesbian feminist poet and the author of five books of poetry, the literary study ‘After Mecca’: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, and the collection, The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980-2005. She co-edited with Steven G. Fullwood To Be Left with the Body, a literary publication of the AIDS Project Los Angeles for men of color having sex with men.
SINCE 1979, her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters, African-American Review, and most recently The Georgia Review and Paideuma: a publication of the National Poetry Foundation; and the iconic anthologies: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. For nine years, she was an editor of Conditions: A Magazine of Writing for Women with an Emphasis on Writing by Lesbians. She is a member of the editorial board of the long-running lesbian journal, Sinister Wisdom.
SHE is a co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills.
“In By My Precise Haircut, Cheryl Clarke collects histories that are all, in effect, personal. Whether the tone is wily or grieving, wise or wise-ass, the reader is drawn closer by the page and into a world that may be Black, Lesbian middle-aged, sister of a deceased Sgt. J.L. Winters, daughter of the Black Elder – but is certainly a threshold for all.” –Kimiko Hahn, author of foreign Bodies, Toxic Flora and Brain Fever