Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, and civil rights activist who described herself as a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City in 1934 to West Indian immigrant parents, she dropped the y from her first name as a child because she preferred the visual symmetry of Audre Lorde.

She studied at Hunter College and Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in library science, and worked for years as a librarian in New York public schools. Her first poems appeared in literary magazines in the late 1950s, and her debut collection The First Cities was published in 1968.

Lorde used her writing to confront racism, sexism, homophobia, and class injustice, often weaving them into a single argument. Her essay collection Sister Outsider and the autobiographical work she called a biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, became foundational texts for feminist and queer thought.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978, she chronicled her treatment and refusal of prosthesis in The Cancer Journals. She taught at Hunter College and helped found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Named Poet Laureate of New York in 1991, she died of cancer in St. Croix in 1992 at the age of fifty-eight.

The name Audre is a feminine form derived from Audrey, which traces back to the Old English Æthelthryth, meaning noble strength. Lorde's chosen spelling preserved that heritage while marking her own act of self-naming, and she carried the meaning of noble strength through the body of work she left behind.