I first met Maxine Clair at the Art Barn in Rock Creek Park. After she read I pestered her to send me some work and after several years she finally agreed. Her exquisite poem “Reincarnation” appeared in Gargoyle #17/18 in 1981.
Maxine Clair
• Running
• Dejavu
• Penmanship
• Lone Lily Beside the Road
• Running
• Dejavu
• Penmanship
• Lone Lily Beside the Road
recorded by Zenon Slawinski at Sonic Images in DC.
[from Gargoyle #34, a cassette issue, released in 1987. All four poems can be found in her first book, the poetry collection Coping with Gravity (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1988).
Maxine Clair (1939-2025) was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. She was the author of the poetry collection Coping with Gravity and the novel Rattlebone. On its first publication, in 1994, Rattlebone received both the Literary Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. October Brown, the teacher in Rattlebone, reappears in October Suite, which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2002. After a career in the medical field, she earned her M.F.A at American University and went on to become a professor at George Washington University. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 1995. Maxine left the planet in September.
W. Ralph Eubanks–The Manner of Our Seeing the Conditions of Our Love: A Reconsideration of Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone (2023)