Michelle Cliff

Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later.[2] She moved back to Jamaica in 1956 and attended St Andrew High School for Girls, where she kept a diary and began writing, before returning to New York City in 1960.[3] She was educated at Wagner College (New York) where she graduated with a B.A. in European History and the Warburg Institute at the University of London where she did post graduate work in Renaissance studies.[1] Her post graduate work focused on the Italian Renaissance.[1] She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College and Emory University.

From 1999, Cliff lived in Santa Cruz, California,[4] with her partner, the American poet Adrienne Rich. The two had been partners since 1976; Rich died in 2012.[5]

Cliff died of liver failure on 12 June 2016.[6][3]

Her first published work came in the form of Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise[1] and covered the many ways Cliff herself experienced racism and prejudice.

Having found fellowship and community with African American and Latina feminists, Cliff's work thrived and contributed to enabling other's voices to be heard. Cliff was a contributor to the 1983 Black feminist anthology Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.[1]

In 1984, Cliff published Abeng, a semi autobiographical novel that explores topics of female sexual subjectivity and Jamaican identity. Next came The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985), which uses the Jamaican folk world, its landscape and culture to examine identity.[1]

Cliff's second novel, No Telephone to Heaven, was published in 1987. At the heart of this novel, which continues the story of Clare Savage from her first novel, Abeng, she explores the need to reclaim a suppressed African past.[1]

Her works were also anthologized in a collection edited by Barbara Smith and Gloria Anzaldúa for Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Writing by Feminists of Color (1990).[1]

From 1990 on, Cliff's work is seen as having taken a more global focus, especially with her first collection of short stories, Bodies of Water.[1] In 1993 she published her third novel, Free Enterprise, and in 1998 she published another collection of short stories, The Store of a Million Items. Both works continue her pursuit of readdressing historical wrongings.[1]

She continued to work throughout the early aughts, releasing several collections of essays and short stories including If I Could Write This Fire (2008) and Everything Is Now: New and Collected Short Stories (2009) and her final novel, Into The Interior (2010).

By 2015, Cliff took part in many literary projects, including translating into English the works of several writers, poets and creatives such as Argentinean poet Alfonsina Stonri; Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico García Lorca and Italian poet, film director and philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini.[1]

In 1981, Cliff became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.[7]

• Curry, Ginette. "Toubab La!": Literary Representations of Mixed-race Characters in the African Diaspora. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2007.
• 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.
• Machado Sáez, Elena (2015), "Writing the Reader: Literacy and Contradictory Pedagogies in Julia Alvarez, Michelle Cliff, and Marlon James", Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ISBN 978-0-8139-3705-2.
• 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.

• Biography Web page at Emory University
• Michelle Cliff Papers, 1982-1994, are held at Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia