Amy Clampitt

1920 –
1994
Read poems by this poet

Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. 

Clampitt’s first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher (Alfred A. Knopf). In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including Westward (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Archaic Figure (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); and What the Light Was Like (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). Her final book, A Silence Opens (Alfred A. Knopf), was published in 1994. 

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Fellowship, Clampitt was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1992. She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Before becoming a poet, Clampitt worked as a secretary at Oxford University Press, as a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and as a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Clampitt taught at William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College. She died in Lenox, Massachusetts, on September 10, 1994.