Audre Lorde

Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City on the eighteenth of February 1934, the youngest daughter of Caribbean immigrants — her mother from Carriacou in the Grenadines, her father from Barbados. She grew up in Harlem, and her lifelong self-description as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" gathered together the identities she would refuse to see divided. She took her undergraduate degree at Hunter College in 1959 and a master's in library science at Columbia University in 1961, working for years as a librarian in the New York public schools.

Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities, appeared in 1968, the same year she took up a writer-in-residence post at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, a turning point that deepened her commitment to poetry and to political struggle. Collections including Cables to Rage (1970), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978) established her as one of the most searching poetic voices of her generation, unafraid of anger, desire, and grief.

In prose she was equally unflinching. The Cancer Journals (1980) confronted her own illness and mastectomy with clarity and courage; Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) gave form to what she called a "biomythography"; and Sister Outsider (1984) collected the essays and speeches that made her a foundational theorist of intersectional and Black feminist thought. In 1980 she and Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

A professor at John Jay College and later at Hunter College, she was named New York State Poet Laureate in 1991. She died on the seventeenth of November 1992 on St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, after long years living with cancer. Honored ancestor, she taught that silence would not protect us — and that our differences, spoken aloud, are a source of power.