Registration not required, but encouraged. Please register for the event here.

Presented in partnership with the Clifton House.

Join us for a panel discussion about the reissue of Lucille Clifton's family memoir, Generations.

Buffalo, New York. A father’s funeral. Memory. In Generations, Lucille Clifton’s formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, “born among the Dahomey people in 1822,” who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author’s grandmother. Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. “I look at my husband,” Clifton writes, “and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”

Sidney Clifton is the daughter of Lucille Clifton and President of The Clifton House, a center for underrepresented and emerging artists, activists, and writers in Baltimore. She is also Senior Vice president of Animation and Mixed Media at the Jim Henson Company and a senior consultant for Black Women Animate.

Tracy K. Smith is a writer and former United States Poet Laureate. The author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, and four poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, she is a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Order your copy of Generations: A Memoir from the Ivy Bookshop.

ASL interpretation will be available for attendees.

Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund.