Lorde, Audre,
1934–1992, African-American poet, essayist, and civil rights
activist, b. New York City, grad. Columbia (M.L.S. 1961). Lorde was born to
immigrant parents from Grenada. While taking classes at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico, Lorde recognized her identity as a lesbian
and poet. She worked as a librarian in New York public schools throughout
the 1960s. During this time, Lorde received a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts and obtained a six-week poet-in-residence position at
Tougaloo College. During the 1970s and 1980s, she became active in the civil
rights, anti-war, and women's movements. Lorde was a professor of English at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice from 1979 to 1981, after which she
became a professor of English at Hunter College util 1987. Lorde was
diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977. She wrote about her illness in
The Cancer Journals (1980), which won the American
Library Association's Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award. She died on
November 17, 1992.
A distinguished prose writer as well as poet, Lord's work focused on challenging
racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, and her writing dealt with topics
related to feminism and Black female identity. Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches (1984) became a central text in Black
studies and related academic fields. A Burst of Light
(1988), another collection of essays, won the Before Columbus Foundation
National Book Award. In 1981, Lorde, along with Cherríe Moraga and Barbara
Smith, founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in order to advance the
work of Black feminists. Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991 to
1992. Her writing has been translated into seven languages.
See A. Keating, Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn
Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (1996); P. H. Collins,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment (2000); A. De Veaux, Warrior
Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004); J. W. Hall, ed.,
Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004); R. P. Byrd, et
al., ed. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of
Audre Lorde (2009); S. Bolaki and S. Broeck, eds.,
Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies (2015); P. I.
Sheppard, Tilling Sacred Grounds: Interiority, Black Women, and
Religious Experience (2022).
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