In honor of Black History Month, Keke is spotlighting the poet Audre Lorde.
“Black, lesbian, mother, warrior and poet” is how writer and activist Audre Lorde describes herself. Her most famous works include Cables to Rage (1970), Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1983). Pivotal in its raw reflection of her personal experience, Lorde utilized her writing as a platform to combat racism, homophobia, and her personal struggle with cancer.
Lorde was born in New York, New York on February 18, 1934, to Caribbean immigrants Frederick Byron Lore and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Her parents soon moved to Harlem, where Lorde was raised.
At a young age, she took an interest in writing and poetry, choosing early on to drop the “y” in her name, “Audrey.” Lorde reasoned the artistic symmetry of the “e”-endings in “Audre” and “Lorde” made it much more linguistically appealing. She picked up other unique habits throughout her childhood, such as using memorized poems to communicate her feelings.
While attending Hunter College High School, Lorde published her first poem in Seventeen Magazine. Upon graduating high school, Lorde attended the National University of Mexico for a year, before finishing her studies at Hunter College in 1959. While a student at Hunter College, Lorde cemented her queer identity, becoming an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She later obtained a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University in 1961, while also working as a librarian.
After publishing her poetry in magazines and anthologies for almost a decade, Lorde released her first volume of poems, The First Cities, in 1968, earning her a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Soon after, Lorde became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College. Her later work, From a Land Where Other People Live was a finalist for a National Book Award for Poetry in 1973.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Lorde continued to publish numerous works exploring her identity as a queer Black woman in America. Continuous themes throughout her writing are her emphasis on social justice and her calls to action directed towards readers. Lorde soon amassed a large readership and following of her written work, due to her honest and powerful reflections on race, sexuality, and gender. Her prose writing in essays such as “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House” became critical texts for feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Lorde was also a proactive advocate for the causes she wrote about. Lorde shared her experience as a member of the LGBTQ community as a guest speaker at the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Two years later, Lorde was a founding member of Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press, a media outlet promoting the writing of feminists and women of color. She also helped to establish the organization Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, with the aim of aiding women in apartheid South Africa.
In 1977, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer, a journey she also documented through her writing. Finding herself further marginalized by the disease, Lorde published The Cancer Journals in 1980, which won the American Library Association’s Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981. Today, The Cancer Journals has become a classic work of illness narrative.
Despite this impediment, Lorde continued as an active member of the New York writing community, teaching as a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College while also earning honorary doctorates from Hunter College, Oberlin College, and Haverford College. She won a Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award for her prose collection A Burst of Light. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of New York for 1991-1992, after being awarded the Bill Whitehead Memorial Award in 1990, and the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit a year later.
Lorde fought hard but ultimately succumbed to her cancer in 1992. 28 years later, in 2020, she was posthumously elected to the American Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Lorde is remembered not only as an immensely talented writer and storyteller, but for the power of her stories and the change they call out for. Moreover, her ability to blend her intersectional identities as the daughter of immigrants, a Black woman, a queer writer, and a cancer fighter makes her story unique in its diversity of experience. Lorde was truly incredible in her constant demonstration of strength and perseverance, despite the many impediments to her throughout her life.
Before she passed, Lorde amended her name yet again, changing it to Gamba Adisa in an African naming ceremony. Her new name, meaning “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known,” perfectly befits the dynamic change-maker.
