Lucille Clifton, born in Depew, New York, and one of the most celebrated African American poets of the twentieth century, received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2007, a lifetime achievement award recognising her decades of work centred on the Black female body, its history of slavery and constraint, its beauty, its vulnerability, and its power. Clifton's poetry had for forty years engaged with what it meant to inhabit a Black woman's body in America, addressing themes from body image to medical experimentation on Black women.

Clifton's poetry represents the most sustained literary engagement with the African American female body in the post-war tradition, and her work connects the history of the corset's racial dimensions — enslaved women forced into European dress codes — to the modern politics of Black women's bodily autonomy. Her celebrated poem 'homage to my hips' directly reclaimed the full Black female body against the corseted Eurocentric ideal. Her award highlighted the tradition of African American women poets challenging bodily norms in verse.