Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Acclaimed Poet, National Book Award Finalist

“What joy to enter the universe Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon wills into being…. with lyrical daring and fierce imagination [she] invents a new world to reveal to us the secret workings of the old” —Cornelius Eady

“Ecstatic lyric, ritual grace under extreme pressure, realized." —Michael S. Harper

“Imagine Leda black - ” begins Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon’s book of poems, Black Swan , winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, in a collection that mixes vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, and gives voice to women past and present. Her most recent book, ]Open Interval[, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. During an interview, she speaks to the title, ]Open Interval[ is a term from mathematics. If you have a line that doesn’t contain its end-points but goes from one point to another, it’s designated by a line with two open circles at the end. I think of life as an open interval and the universe as an open interval, and also faith.”

Van Clief-Stefanon is co-author, with Elizabeth Alexander, of the chapbook Poems in Conversation and a Conversation. She is currently at work on a third collection, The Coal Tar Colors. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Callaloo, African American Review, Crab Orchard, and Shenandoah, as well as several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page, Common Wealth, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She teaches in the English Department at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, NY.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD CITATION
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.

About ]OPEN INTERVAL[ (2009)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s latest book, ]Open Interval[ (Pittsburgh Press), is a lovely meditation on the concept of distance. Open Interval attempts to measure and name the distances between thoughts and bodies, celestial and/or physical. Van Clief-Stefanon tackles Astronomy, the blues, visual art and music through skillfully crafted free verse and sonnets. Like the Romare Bearden paintings she writes about in ]Open Interval[, Van Clief-Stefanon’s work is colorful, sometimes playful, grounded in reality, yet other-worldly at the same time. —Bomb Magazine