Cheryl Clarke

Cheryl L. Clarke is a lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist she lives in Jersey City, New Jersey and Hobart, New York.With her life partner, Barbara Balliet, she is coowner of Bleinheim Hill Books, a used and rare bookstore in Hobart. Her younger sister is novelist, Breena Clarke, with whom Clarke and Balliet organize the Hobart Festival of Women writers each summer. Her scholarship focuses on African American womens literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States. Retired from her work in higher education, she manitains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance.

The daughter of James Sheridan Clarke , a veteran of World War II, and Edna Clarke, Cheryl was born and raised in Washington, D.C. at the height of the American civil rights movement, one of four sisters and a brother. The family was Catholic, descended from freed slaves who had emigrated to the nations capitol after the Civil War. Both parents were civil servants and registered Democrats James Clarke worked for the National Bureau of Standards for thirtythree years, and was considered to be the mayor of their neighborhood in the NW section of Washington. Experiencing Jim Crow segregation first hand in Washington for much of their lives, James and Edna raised their children with a strong sense of social justice and a belief in the importance of political activism. When she was thirteen, Clarke crossed a picket line of AfricanAmerican activists protesting segregation at Woolworths on 14th Street, believing that this was a rebellious act. However,when she came home her mother, a staunch

Source: Wikipedia