Poet, critic, and activist Cheryl Clarke was born in Washington, DC. She earned her degrees from Howard University and Rutgers University. Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), By My Precise Haircut (2016), which won a Hilary Tham Capital Competition, and Archives of Style: New and Selected Poems (2024). She wrote the critical study " After Mecca" Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005), and the essay collection The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980- 2005 (2006). Clarke served as co-editor of Conditions, " a feminist journal of writing, with an emphasis on writing by lesbians." She currently lives in Hobart, New York, where, with her partner, Barbara J. Balliet, she owns and operates Blenheim Hill Books.