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Michelle Cliff

May 30, 2019

Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica in 1946 and settled in New York City at age three with her family, where she passed away in 2016. She published four collections of prose and poetry: Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1984), The Land of Look Behind (1985), Bodies of Water (1990) and The Store of a Million Items: Stories (1998), although she is mainly known as a novelist. The problems of identity caused by colonialism and racism are her novels’ main themes; these titles are: Abeng (1987), No Telephone to Heaven (1989), Free Enterprise (1993) and Into the Interior (2010). Michelle Cliff was an editorial producer of history and political books at W.W. Norton publishing house, and Jamaica was always her leading influence.