19 Feb 2021

Audre Lorde

Black authors post, Day 19.

Black authors post, Day 19.

Today’s author is feminist, writer, civil rights activitist, librarian, educator, and poet Audre Lorde.

Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born in 1934 in New York City. Her parents were Caribbean immigrants; her father from Barbados and her mother from the island of Carriacou. She grew up listening to her mother’s stories of the West Indies. As a child, Lorde struggled to communicate with others, and used poems she memorized to communicate. Around the age of twelve, she began to write her own poetry. When she was in high school, she published her first poem in Seventeen magazine, after her school’s literary journal rejected it for being “inappropriate”.

After high school, she attended National University of Mexico, and graduated from Hunter College. She earned her Master’s Degree in Library Science from Columbia University. In 1962, she married Edwin Rollins, who she had two children with and later divorced. While she was living in New York she worked as a librarian and published poems regularly in Black literary magazines and anthologies.

In 1968, Lorde was the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Her first volume of poems, The First Cities, was published in 1968. She met her partner Frances Clayton during her time in Mississippi, and they remained romantic partners until 1989.

Her third book of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live, published in 1973 was nominated for a National Book Award. She taught at several institutions in the New York area during this time, including Lehman College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and her alma mater Hunter College.

Along with her poetry, Lorde wrote several prose books, some of which were deeply personal. In 1978, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent a mastectomy. She published The Cancer Journals in 1980, a collection of prose and essays about her journey through treatment.

In 1981 Lorde and fellow writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to furthering the writings of black feminists. In 1984, Lorde was a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin. While she was there, she was very influential in helping develop the burgeoning Afro-German movement.

Audre Lorde died of cancer at the age of 58 on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, where she lived with her partner Gloria Joseph. In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known”.

Links to some of my favorite books by Audre Lorde:

A note: These Amazon links point to Amazon Smile, Amazon’s affiliate charity program. If you have not set up Amazon Smile, I encourage you to point it to an organization like the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, a statewide community foundation that invests in innovation to drive gender and racial equity in Minnesota.

Some links: