FARMINGTON – The importance of diversity was highlighted Monday night when award-winning poet and children’s author Lucille Clifton came to speak.
“I want to talk about lots of things I think matter, even in this fairly nondiverse town,” Clifton said to the crowd at the University of Maine at Farmington’s Lincoln Auditorium, where she was reading from her work.
“When I was a child, the only people I saw in books who looked like me were in ‘Little Black Sambo,'” said the black author, referring to an old storybook.
Clifton’s first children’s book, “Some of the Days of Everett Anderson,” published in 1969, is about a black boy living with his mother in a poor neighborhood.
“I wanted to write it because my kids never saw kids who looked like them in books,” said Clifton. “I wanted to write something that children like my children could see.”
In the book, she uses words like “black” and “ebony” in a positive way to try to create positive connotations for them.
Clifton talked about the term “color blind” and said she doesn’t want people to be color-blind or to ignore color.
“The place to get to is where we can see color and we can see difference, and it doesn’t make any difference,” she said.
“The planet is a planet of color,” she added. “We need to have imagery of all parts of the world.”
Clifton said people need to have some idea of how they fit into the world. She stressed the importance of learning about other cultures and races not only in places where differences abound, but also in places like Farmington, where people don’t usually have the opportunity to learn from direct contact with a diverse population.
“It is not unnecessary for us to know about the rest of the world,” she said.
Clifton has written 10 books of poetry and more than 20 children’s books.
She is the only poet to have two books nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in the same year, and her children’s story, “Everett Anderson’s Good-bye,” won the Coretta Scott King Award.
She lives in Maryland where she teaches at St. Mary’s College.
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