Clarence Major

Clarence Major (born December 31, 1936) is an American poet, painter, and novelist; winner of the 2015 "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts", presented by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

Clarence Major was born on December 31, 1936, in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois.

As a teenager he started drawing and painting, writing poetry and fiction.

In his early twenties he started publishing his own literary magazine, Coercion Review, which featured poets and writers such as Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

As a teenager, Major was influenced by the monumental Van Gogh Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, February 1 – April 16, 1950.

Major analyzed news coverage of the 1960s riots.

After a stint in the Air Force, Major left the Midwest and moved to New York City in December 1966.

He also did field work on the riots, in Detroit and Milwaukee, before turning, in 1967, to teaching.

First, he taught in Harlem at the New Lincoln School, in a summer program.

He later taught modern American literature courses and creative writing workshops in universities.

Along with John A. Williams, in 1968, he taught for a stint at Girard College in Philadelphia.

During this time Major was also giving public readings of his poetry.

He served on the editorial staff of several literary periodicals (such as Caw! and The Journal of Black Poetry) and wrote a regular column for The American Poetry Review.

He was the first editor of American Book Review.

He read his poetry at the Guggenheim Museum, the Folger Theatre and in universities, theaters and cultural centers.

His first novel, All Night Visitors, was published in 1969 and his first collection of poems, Swallow the Lake, the following year.

He briefly worked as a research analyst for Simulmatics, under the direction of sociologist Dr. Sol Chaneles.

His first solo exhibition of paintings was at Sarah Lawrence College in the library in the early 1970s.

Major won a National Council on the Arts Award for his poetry collection Swallow the Lake in 1970, and the following year was awarded a New York Cultural Foundation grant for poetry.

He joined the Fiction Collective in 1974.

Major edited High Plains Literary Review for several years.

On a State Department-sponsored trip in 1975 he was a participant at the International Poetry Festival in Struga, Yugoslavia, where he read his work with Leopold Sedar Senghor and other poets from around the world.

In 1977, with John Ashbery and other poets from various countries, Major read at the Poetry International in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Major has taught literature and/or creative writing at Brooklyn College, New York University, Queens College, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Washington, Howard University, University of Maryland, University of Colorado, Temple University, Binghamton University, the University of California at Davis and on a Fulbright-Hays Exchange award he taught American culture at the University of Nice, in France, 1981–1983.

Reflexe et Ossature (1982), the French translation of Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), was nominated for the Prix Maurice Coindreau (1982).

In 1987, he served twice on the National Endowment for the Arts Awards panels; and in 1997–98 he served as judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

He has judged state-sponsored literary contests in Ohio, New York, Washington, Colorado and California.

Major is distinguished professor emeritus of 20th-Century American Literature at the University of California at Davis.

His literary archives are in the Givens Collection of African American Literature, Anderson Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For the most reliable biographical information on Clarence Major see Contemporary Authors, Volume 337, 2013, pages 270–312, ISBN 978-1-4144-8925-4.

Such Was The Season (1987) was a Literary Guild book club selection in 1988.

The same year The New York Times Book Review recommended it on its annual "Summer Reading" list.

Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar (1988) was cited by The New York Times Book Review as a "Notable Book of The Year" 1988.

Although he had been painting all along, after moving to California in 1989 he showed his paintings more frequently in galleries.

He left the University of Colorado in 1989 and he taught at the University of California, Davis, for 18 years before his retirement in 2007.

He won the Pushcart Prize for the short story "My Mother and Mitch", in 1989.

In 1990, his short-story collection, Fun & Games, was nominated for the Los Angeles Book Critics Award.

In 1991, Major served as fiction judge for the National Book Awards.

Major won a Bronze Medal as a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999 for Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958–1998 (Copper Canyon Press).

He was awarded the 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.