Audre Lorde

Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born in Harlem, New York, on the eighteenth of February 1934, the daughter of Grenadian immigrants. She took her undergraduate degree at Hunter College and her master's in library science at Columbia. She published her first poetry collection, The First Cities, in 1968.

She produced, over the next quarter-century, the most theoretically consequential body of Black feminist work of the twentieth century. Eight collections of poetry. Five works of prose. The Cancer Journals (1980), her account of breast cancer and the medical politics of her body, opened the genre of illness memoir as political analysis. Sister Outsider (1984) gathered her essays — including "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" and "The Uses of the Erotic" — into the most cited collection of Black feminist theory.

Her self-description — "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" — has become the political introduction of the intersectional feminist tradition. The discipline of women's studies in the American academy reorganized around her work from the mid-1980s onward.

She taught at John Jay College and Hunter and was named New York State Poet Laureate in 1991. She lived her last years on Saint Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she had returned in part for her Caribbean roots and in part because the island climate gave her cancer-treatment regime a longer runway.

She died in Saint Croix on the seventeenth of November 1992, age fifty-eight.

She is honored here as the warrior-poet who gave the intersectional tradition its name.