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Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Lynn Clarke (born Washington D.C., May 16, 1947) is an American lesbian poet, essayist, educator, and Black feminist community activist. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women's literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States.
For more than 40 years, Clarke was founding Director of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian/Gay Concerns, later the Office of Social Justice Education and LBT Communities, at Rutgers University. She maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, though retired. In addition, Clarke serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance.
The daughter of James Sheridan Clarke, a World War II veteran, and Edna Clarke, Cheryl Clarke 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 nation's capitol after the Civil War. Both parents were civil servants and registered Democrats.
When she was 13 years old, Clarke crossed a picket line of African-American activists protesting segregation at Woolworth's on 14th Street. When she came home, her mother, a staunch union member, told her never to cross a picket line again, educating her about the role of direct action in the civil rights movement. At 16, Clarke was allowed by her parents to attend the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with them. The day before the march, on her way downtown to acquire information about the route, she encountered Martin Luther King Jr., who would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech the next day.
Clarke attended parochial schools in the District of Columbia, and matriculated at Howard University in 1965. She received a B.A. in English literature in 1969. Subsequently, she enrolled at Rutgers University, completing a Master of Arts in 1974, a Master of Social Work in 1980, and a PhD in 2000. For much of this time, she also worked for Rutgers, beginning her employment there in 1970 in the Urban University Program. In 1992, she was the founding Director of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian/Gay Concerns, which later became the Office for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities. She served as the dean of students of the Livingston Campus at Rutgers University from 2010 to 2013, when she retired.
Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (originally self-published in 1981 and distributed by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1982); for Firebrand Books, Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), and Experimental Love (1993); and for Word Works, By My Precise Haircut (2016). She also published After Mecca — Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2005), and Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980–2005 (Carroll & Graf Publishing, 2006), a collection that represented 25 years of published writing.
Clarke served on the editorial collective of Conditions, an early lesbian publication, and has been published in numerous anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Conditions, This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, The Black Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Belles Lettres, and Gay Community News. Clarke's articles, "Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance" and "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community", published in This Bridge Called My Back and Home Girls, respectively, are often included in women's studies, Black studies, and English studies curricula.
Cheryl Clarke is the author of "Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance", originally published in 1981 in the feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. The essay's main intervention is to expand the categories of who counts as a lesbian and what lesbianism is. Rather than defining a lesbian only as a woman who has sex with other women, Clarke insists that "there is no one kind of lesbian, no one kind of lesbian behavior, and no one kind of lesbian relationship." Thinking of "lesbian" as a continuum, she makes space for women who have sexual and emotional relationships with women but identify with other labels. In the same way, she redefines lesbianism "as an ideological, political, and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny." Because she imagines lesbianism to be in opposition to male tyranny and coerced heterosexuality, she defines it as resistance, no matter how a woman is actually practicing it in her personal life.[citation needed]
Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Lynn Clarke (born Washington D.C., May 16, 1947) is an American lesbian poet, essayist, educator, and Black feminist community activist. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women's literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States.
For more than 40 years, Clarke was founding Director of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian/Gay Concerns, later the Office of Social Justice Education and LBT Communities, at Rutgers University. She maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, though retired. In addition, Clarke serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance.
The daughter of James Sheridan Clarke, a World War II veteran, and Edna Clarke, Cheryl Clarke 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 nation's capitol after the Civil War. Both parents were civil servants and registered Democrats.
When she was 13 years old, Clarke crossed a picket line of African-American activists protesting segregation at Woolworth's on 14th Street. When she came home, her mother, a staunch union member, told her never to cross a picket line again, educating her about the role of direct action in the civil rights movement. At 16, Clarke was allowed by her parents to attend the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with them. The day before the march, on her way downtown to acquire information about the route, she encountered Martin Luther King Jr., who would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech the next day.
Clarke attended parochial schools in the District of Columbia, and matriculated at Howard University in 1965. She received a B.A. in English literature in 1969. Subsequently, she enrolled at Rutgers University, completing a Master of Arts in 1974, a Master of Social Work in 1980, and a PhD in 2000. For much of this time, she also worked for Rutgers, beginning her employment there in 1970 in the Urban University Program. In 1992, she was the founding Director of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian/Gay Concerns, which later became the Office for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities. She served as the dean of students of the Livingston Campus at Rutgers University from 2010 to 2013, when she retired.
Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (originally self-published in 1981 and distributed by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1982); for Firebrand Books, Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), and Experimental Love (1993); and for Word Works, By My Precise Haircut (2016). She also published After Mecca — Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2005), and Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980–2005 (Carroll & Graf Publishing, 2006), a collection that represented 25 years of published writing.
Clarke served on the editorial collective of Conditions, an early lesbian publication, and has been published in numerous anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Conditions, This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, The Black Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Belles Lettres, and Gay Community News. Clarke's articles, "Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance" and "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community", published in This Bridge Called My Back and Home Girls, respectively, are often included in women's studies, Black studies, and English studies curricula.
Cheryl Clarke is the author of "Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance", originally published in 1981 in the feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. The essay's main intervention is to expand the categories of who counts as a lesbian and what lesbianism is. Rather than defining a lesbian only as a woman who has sex with other women, Clarke insists that "there is no one kind of lesbian, no one kind of lesbian behavior, and no one kind of lesbian relationship." Thinking of "lesbian" as a continuum, she makes space for women who have sexual and emotional relationships with women but identify with other labels. In the same way, she redefines lesbianism "as an ideological, political, and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny." Because she imagines lesbianism to be in opposition to male tyranny and coerced heterosexuality, she defines it as resistance, no matter how a woman is actually practicing it in her personal life.[citation needed]