Lu Clifton Books in Order

Lu Clifton was born in southeastern Oklahoma. Her early childhood was split between Oklahoma and California, with Route 66 and Greyhound buses playing a practical role in family travel. Her parents separated when she was very young, and by the end of third grade she had lived in four states and attended school in three.

Her family eventually put down roots in the Texas Panhandle. Clifton completed an associate degree in Texas, then married and raised two sons in Colorado. There she earned both a BA and an MA in English from Colorado State University.

That early movement, and the need to adapt to new places, later found its way into her fiction.

Clifton knew from childhood that she wanted to write, but writing had to fit around work, family, and everyday responsibilities. Before pursuing fiction full time, she worked in communications for companies including Hewlett Packard and Hyundai, wrote and edited for newspapers and magazines, and taught nonfiction writing at Colorado State University and Cardinal Stritch University.

The real shift came after she left her job as director of corporate communications for a Colorado high-tech company. She began studying the publishing business, trying different forms, and entering contests to get useful feedback. Early contest wins gave her the encouragement to keep going, even as cross-country moves slowed the process.

Her books for younger readers often focus on kids dealing with broken homes, blended families, or big disruptions. In Freaky Fast Frankie Joe, a boy sent from Texas to live with the father he barely knows starts a bicycle delivery service while plotting his escape. Seeking Cassandra won the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award for young adult fiction.

Her adult work takes a different route. The Sam Chitto mysteries follow a Choctaw Tribal Police investigator in Oklahoma, where difficult cases meet complicated jurisdictions, old wounds, and local history. Beginning with Scalp Dance, the series also includes The Bone Picker, The Horned Owl, Five-Dollar Indian, and No Trespassing. Clifton draws on her interest in mythology and family history, and has said that she has Native American ancestry on both sides of her family, though she is not a member of a tribal nation.

The mysteries make room for science, folklore, police work, and the wooded, hilly landscape of southeastern Oklahoma. Sam is also trained as a geologist, which gives the investigations a grounded attention to land, rocks, and place. Several of Clifton's adult novels have been Oklahoma Book Award finalists, including Scalp Dance, The Bone Picker, The Horned Owl, and Seeking Grace In Beulah Land.

She now lives in Illinois with a brown tabby named Mary Jane. Outside writing, she belongs to a book group and a local art guild, where she works mainly in pastel painting.