About:
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a National Book Award finalist and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Shenandoah, and in the anthologies Bum Rush the Page, Role Call, Common Wealth, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third collection of poems, and Purchase, a collection of essays. Van Clief-Stefanon is a native of Florida and received her BA at Washington and Lee University and her MFA from Penn State. She lived for many years in Virginia and now teaches in the English Department at Cornell University.
Praise for the work of Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon:
The National Book Award Foundation: Passionate and personal, innovative and elegant, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval marries a wildness of vision with a lens-maker’s precision. The book takes on the actual astronomical phenomenon of “RR Lyrae” stars not only to form a metaphor for the self, but to reveal a constellation of lyric impulses. In exploded sonnets, taut syllabics, Dickinsonian dashes, or that new poetic invention, the bop, Van Clief-Stefanon writes of science, rock-n-roll, and the history of a heart that could be hers, but speaks to all of ours.
Dawn Lundy Martin writes: “Van Clief-Stefanon is a master poet who pays attention to craft in ways reminiscent of Rita Dove—one of the first poets to introduce me to that beautiful glimmering gap between the said and the unsaid, that space of intrigue. It is here when Van Clief-Stefanon beckons us into her poetics—softly southern, intellectually rigorous, a warm breeze that might or might not bring a ravaging storm. These new poems by Van Clief-Stefanon also articulate a formal range, like in ‘Election Cycle,’ where she stretches her long legs inside the infinitely possibility around utterance.
Interviews with Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon:
“Room Enough to Say What I Mean”: An Interview with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.
The Writer’s Block: A Video Q&A with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon:
An interview with Cave Canem Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon on her creative and research process.
Poetry as Communication and Career: An Interview with Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon
Poetry:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/lyrae-van-clief-stefanon