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Biography:
 Audre Lorde was born
in 1934 in New York to parents of West Indian heritage. She passed
away in 1992, a victim of breast cancer. Her battle with the
disease, which was chronicled in works like The Cancer Journals, was
just one of many struggles she had to deal with in life. Audre Lorde
was a black homosexual female in a world dominated by white
heterosexual males. She fought for justice on each of these minority
fronts. Her writings protest against the swallowing of black
American culture by an indifferent white population, against the
perpetuation of sex discrimination, and against the neglect of the
movement for gay rights. Her poetry, however, is not entirely
political in content. It is extremely romantic in nature and is
described by Joan Martin as ringing with, "passion, sincerity,
perception, and depth of feeling."
Not only was Audre
Lorde a writer and an activist but also she was an educator. She
held numerous teaching positions and toured the world as a lecturer.
She formed coalitions between Afro-German and Afro-Dutch women,
founded a sisterhood in South Africa, began Women of Color Press,
and established the St. Croix Women's Coalition. She was living in
St.Croix at the time of her death. Perhaps the most fitting summary
of her life and work can be found in a Boston Globe tribute by Renee
Graham: "She took her frailties and misfortunes, her strengths
and passions, and forged them into something searing, sometimes
startling, always stirring verse. Her words pranced with cadence,
full of their own rhythms, all punctuated resolve and spirit. With words spun into light, she could weep like Billie
Holiday, chuckle like Dizzy Gillespie or bark bad like John Coltrane."
Works:
Undersong: Chosen Poems, Old And New
Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance: Poems 1987-1992
Collected Poems Of Audre Lorde
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old And New
Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance
Black Unicorn: Poems
Our Dead Behind Us: Poems
Coal
Collected Poems Of Audre Lorde
Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name
Sister Outsider: Essays And Speeches
Burst Of Light: Essays
Cancer Journals
Cancer Journals
The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches And Journals
Zami
Links:
www.The Cancer Journal.com
www.CancerJournals.com
wwwSister/Outsider.com
www.Women Make Movies: A Film About Audre Lorde .com
www.The Body of a Poet: A Tribute to Audre Lorde.com
www.New Moon Rising 1995.com
www.Firebrand Books.com
www.Tom's Audre Lorde Page.com
www.Audre Lorde.com
www.Tribute to Audre Lorde.com
Criticism
Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City of West Indian parents.
She also wrote under the name of Rey Domini. She grew up in
Manhattan and attended Roman Catholic schools. Lorde attended Hunter
College in New York City from 1951 to 1959. She continued her
education at Columbia University in 1961, where she earned her
master's degree in library science. Lorde also worked as a librarian
and married Edward Ashley Rollins with whom she had two children,
Elizabeth and Johnathon; she and Rollins divorced in 1970. Lorde
considered 1968 to be the turning point of her life. She left her
job as head librarian at the University of New York to become a
lecturer and creative writer. She received a National Endowment for
the Arts grant, and accepted the poet-in-residence at Tougaloo
College in Mississippi. It was at Tougaloo that Lorde published her
first volume of poetry, The First Cities.
The First Cities was considered innovative and refreshing. Critics also described it
as a quiet introspective book. Another book of poetry written by
Lorde, Coal, was the first of her volumes to be released by a
major publisher. In Coal, Lorde expresses her feelings of
love and appreciation for her blackness. Lorde's The Black
Unicorn, written in 1978, is considered her most complex and
successful work. In The Black Unicorn, she uses symbols and
mythologies of African goddesses. Another important work of Lorde is
her first book of non-fiction, The Cancer Journals, written
in 1980. This work is about herself, her struggle with breast cancer
and her mastectomy. In The Cancer Journals Lorde explores the
feeling of hopelessness and despair as she faces death itself. She
felt that this book gave her strength and power to explore her
experience with cancer and to share it with other women.
Lorde described herself as "a black-lesbian feminist mother lover
poet" (Black Literature Vol. 2). Claudia Tate says of
Lorde that she "derives the impetus of her poetry's force,
tone, and vision from her identity as a black women who is both a
radical feminist and an outspoken lesbian, and as a visionary of a
better world. In stunning figurative language she outlines the
progress of her unyielding struggle for the human rights of all
people" (Women Writers at Work, p 113) She wrote about
her anger toward racial oppression, and personal hardship. She wrote
many essays about being a black woman in the feminist movement,
including the compilations Sister Outsider and Uses of the
Erotic. One of the most widely used quotes in the feminist
movement today comes from the title of one essay in Sister
Outsider entitled The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master's House.
Lorde wrote from her heart. She loved writing poems. She was an articulate
person who could read poems and memorize them. However, when she was
younger she was inarticulate, and she did not speak until the age of
five. She started to speak when she began to read and write poetry
at the age of about twelve. Her parents did not encourage her to
write poetry. She learned, rather, from her mother's strangeness and
her father's silences. Lorde published her first poem at the age of
fifteen. She had written of her first love affair with a boy in
Hunter High School, but her teacher told her it was too romantic. On
her own, Lorde sent the poem to Seventeen magazines because
the school would not print it.
Lorde wrote of racism in the feminist movement, sexism among African
Americans, and of lesbians and love. She not only wrote for herself,
but for her children and women as well. She wrote for people who
could read her, who would be able to hear what she had to say. She
wrote for women who had no voice of their own. She particularly
wrote for black women because she felt there were very few voices
for black women out there. She wrote for the women terrified to
speak because they are taught to respect fear more than themselves.
Lorde wrote particularly for women of color in many countries. She
was one of the founding members of Kitchen Table: Women of Color
Press, which published the works of women of color. She felt it
was her responsibility to speak the truth with as much beauty and
precision as possible. She felt her responsibility was in writing
for and of women because there are many voices for men and not
enough for women. Lorde died of liver cancer in 1992 at the age of
58. She was a talented woman who touched the lives of many through
her writing, and her teachings will live on.
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