Michelle Cliff is a Jamaican-American writer and teacher. Her work includes the short story collections Bodies of
Water and The Store of a Million Items--the latter chosen by the
Village Voice as one of the best books of 1998--and the novels Abeng, No Telephone to
Heaven, and Free Enterprise.
She held the Allan K. Smith Professorship of English Language and Literature at Trinity College, 1993-1999. She was the recipient of two NEA fellowships, a fellowship from the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts; she was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, New Zealand; the recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chávez, and Rosa Parks Visiting Professorship at the University of Michigan, was twice visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center, visiting professor at Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany, etc. Her most recent work includes the novel Into the Interior and the essay collection Apocalypso, as yet unpublished. Her translations of seven poems by Federico García Lorca are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review."