Michelle Cliff—a Jamaican-American writer/activist/professor who was the widow of Adrienne Rich—died of liver failure June 12 at age 69.
Cliff was born Nov. 2, 1946, in Kingston, Jamaica. Her parents emigrated to New York soon after her birth, but the Cliffs returned to Jamaica while she was still a toddler. They eventually returned to New York when Cliff was a teen.
In 1975, she met Rich, who was published by Norton, where Cliff worked as a production editor. Eventually, Cliff published published “Notes on Speechlessness” in Sinister Wisdom, a feminist journal of lesbian culture that she and Rich edited and published in the early 1980s.
Some of Cliff’s books include Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise.