Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third poetry collection, and Purchase, a collection of essays. She is an associate professor of English at Cornell University.
Reading List
Lush/Life
What used to be—: a school; what use to volunteer to taste a misheard order? This day: espresso; a coffee-colored woman; the walls of this café, once orange behind the long row of fish tanks above the banquettes, drawing her public displays of alienation weekly. Meekly, I’ll take it, she tells the waitstaff. A regular, […]
Yes Yes Dakar, 2018
I hear myself sighing wow. Wow across years I’ve marveled at my great-grandmother’s face emerging from solution in my own features. The sea quiets its respiration for me, smacks wow. Wow in foam, in surf, in shudder of shore-break. I… I… if Mama did not come from here—: how could she not? If I know […]