In No Telephone to Heaven Cliff addressed homophobia in Jamaica by including a queer character, Harry/Harriet, a man who wants to be a woman and who loves women. Cliff stated that she "wanted to portray a character who would be the most despised character in Jamaica and show how heroic he is." She added that "he really loves his people. He is there helping, yet if they knew what he really was, they would kill him." He has endured the horrors of the subjugated, including rape, and yet he has managed to achieve what Clare never could, creating and claiming his own identity. Cliff called him "the most complete character in the book."

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Cliff's third novel, Free Enterprise (1993), is a fictionalized tale of the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, an abolitionist who supported John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry. The novel emphasizes the role of women who acted courageously to oppose the slave trade.

In her latest book, The Store of a Million Items (1998), Cliff returns to the format of short stories. Reviewer Lisa S. Nussbaum commented that they "read very nearly like parables without being preachy or moralistic in tone" and that "Cliff reaffirms the basic human dignity of each of her characters as she celebrates their fierce independence."

Cliff has taught literature and creative writing at a number of colleges, including the New School for Social Research, Stanford University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is a frequent contributor to many publications, including Ms. and The Village Voice, and often lectures on the subjects of racial and heterosexist prejudice.

Cliff and Rich make their home in Santa Cruz, California.

Most African-American lesbian literature is as concerned with racism as it is with sexuality, causing many writers to construct Afrocentric sexual identities that affirm the power of black women.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

In the first century of its existence, lesbian autobiography has moved from being coded to being outspoken, and it is both wide ranging and contradictory in the stories that it tells.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Although the islands of the Caribbean are renowned for their pleasant tropical climate, the social climate for glbtq people is not always inviting and is sometimes dangerous.

Adrienne Rich, who has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.