Lucille Clifton, a St. Mary's, Md.,-based poet and children's author, has won the $100,000 US Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the largest and most prestigious U.S. literary honours.

She becomes the first African-American woman to win the prize, which honours lifetime accomplishment by a U.S. poet.

Clifton has published 11 books of poetry, including two that were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, one book of prose and 19 children's books.

"Lucille Clifton is a powerful presence and voice in American poetry," Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, said in a statement on Monday that announced Clifton's win.

"Her poems are at once outraged and tender, small and explosive, sassy and devout. She sounds like no one else, and her achievement looks larger with each passing year."

Open lines of Homage to my Hips
these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they don’t fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don’t like to be held back...

Among her best-loved poems is Homage to My Hips.

Now 70, Clifton published her first book of poetry, Good Times, in 1969 and it was cited by the New York Times as one of the year's top 10 books.

She served as the poet laureate of Maryland from 1974 until 1985 and won the National Book Award in 2000 for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems. Her most recent collection of poetry is Mercy, published in 2004.

In 1988, her Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir and Next were both nominated for a Pulitzer.

Clifton is a professor of the humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Born in 1936 in New York, Clifton started college but didn't finish after her family ran into financial difficulties. She is a mother of six, but lost two children.

Her poetry has dealt with these tragedies and personal stories such as the death of her husband and the lynching of her great-great-grandmother for shooting the man who raped her — she was the first African-American woman to be hanged in Virginia.

"Her poems are local and funny, and have their own particular idiom; they speak big things in quiet ways, and she's voracious in the subject matter she takes on, spanning city and country, speaking for the unspoken, the sacred and the invisible," the jury said in its citation.

"Clifton has added enormously to the representation of the African-American experience in poetry and has been a kind of historical consciousness for her people and a public consciousness for us all."

The Ruth Lilly Prize is given annually by the Poetry Foundation in the U.S.