Streeter: Literary legend Lucille Clifton’s home deserves celebration and preservation

There is an active fundraising campaign to support operations at the historic home of a legendary poet who was born farther north but whose literary stamp on Baltimore is undeniable. As a local resident myself, it seems vital to keep the space alive, in honor of so important a writer.

No, not Edgar Allan Poe. The other one.

“There is something resonant about stepping into the space of a Black literary figure and imagining what it was then,” said Joël Díaz, executive director of The Clifton House, the former home of Maryland poet laureate, Pulitzer finalist and National Book Award-winning artist Lucille Clifton. “It feels encouraging.”

The house, operated as what Díaz called “a sanctuary for artists, providing nourishment and support to nurture their craft,” is the subject of a fundraising effort called 90 Donors in 90 Days. The campaign commemorates what would have been Clifton’s 90th birthday year and seeks to raise at least $200,000 for operating costs.

The sprawling, leafy grounds of the Windsor Hills house, where the writer and her artist husband, Fred, raised their six children, are as important a Baltimore site as, say, the Poe House and Museum, where macabre master Edgar Allan lived. I’m a big fan of that brilliant and melancholy mustachioed man, so linked with the city that the football team is named in his honor. But I want similar love for the home of someone like Clifton, who wrote much of her award-winning work in and around the city and the state.

Her works, including the collections “Two-Headed Woman,” “Blessing the Boats” and “The Book of Light,” are lyrical dissertations on Black femininity, motherhood and a proudly flawed, lived-in humanity. Like the resilience of Baltimore itself, her poems are about taking traits that others would see as weaknesses and turning them into strengths.

“She was not shouting at us, but she was unapologetic in her femininity,” said DaMaris Hill, an award-winning poet and the chair of the English and language arts department at Morgan State University. “It was like, ‘This is my life. I’m fine with it. Can you be cool with it?’”

On display in the home are some old photographs of it in the 1970s. Díaz said few interiors of Black people’s homes from that time exist, perhaps because it was assumed there was nothing there of value, design-wise. Ouch. Also, the preservation of the homes of Black American literary figures is severely lacking, according to a 2025 Literary Hub article, which bore the sad statistic that only 2% of the 95,000 sites on the National Register of Historic Places are related to African American figures and history.

The speculation is that this happens because of red tape, the expense of preservation and the fact that many Black-owned homes fall out of the hands of their families. That’s what happened to the Cliftons, who lost their home to foreclosure in 1980 — what the poet’s daughter, Emmy-nominated producer Sidney Clifton, told me in 2023 was “a shared family trauma. My mother had been quoted as saying, ‘I don’t think my family ever survived the losing of that house.’”

Although the Cliftons would never again live at the house on Talbot Road, it would come back to them. On Feb. 13, 2019, the ninth anniversary of Clifton’s death, Sidney Clifton said she “woke up with the strong instinct to reach out to the current owner and ask for the status of the house.” Within the hour, she was told that the place was for sale. She bought it, and two years later, The Clifton House was opened.

The home was built in 1908, and like so many older structures, it bears the marks of the many people who have passed through it. Walls and doors were moved around when it was split into apartments, and an elevator that existed when the Cliftons were there is gone, although Díaz said there are plans to replace it to make the house truly accessible.

But seeing it now, the spirit of the poet swirls throughout, with family photos and Fred’s sculptures as well as Lucille’s doll collection and a photo from that time she was a clue on “Jeopardy!”

I fell in love with Clifton’s words when I read “The Book of Light” in a poetry class at the University of Maryland, not long after its 1993 release. I had never identified more with a collection of verse before. It illuminated everything I wrestled with as a Black woman in my 20s, like societal expectations to swallow one’s own grief, or whether the faith of my childhood worked for me anymore.

Hill, who wrote her thesis on Clifton and was honored to be able to interview her for it, said that the poet’s work was timeless because it was “deceptively simplistic. You could believe that you could understand that poem when you were younger, and then got grown enough to read it again and realize you fooled yourself into believing you knew what it meant.”

I am of two minds about categorizing literature as “Black” or “women’s.” I think these distinctions can make readers outside those groups believe that there’s nothing of worth for them. But they’re incredibly important for explaining what you are getting into. Clifton’s work is unapologetically about her experience growing up, as she writes in “won’t you celebrate with me” as someone “both nonwhite and woman.”

She continues, “what did i see to be except myself? i made it up.” And isn’t that Baltimore? Aren’t we a place that confronts the stark truth of who we are, takes full stock of it, and then trudges forward with a little humor and style?

The Clifton House is no longer the home of a family, but it does house a community of creativity and words, laying out a welcome mat for those seeking to hear and create themselves. That’s a concept worth supporting.

“Walk around and let the house speak to you,” Díaz said, “because it will.”