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Audre Lorde

photo by Elsa Dorfman

The Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, warrior Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a native New Yorker and daughter of immigrants. Both her activism and her published work speak to the importance of struggle for liberation among oppressed peoples and of organizing in coalition across differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age and ability. An internationally recognized activist and artist, Audre Lorde was the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, which conferred the mantle of New York State poet for 1991-93. In designating her New York State’s Poet Laureate, Governor Mario Cuomo observed: “Her imagination is charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice…She cries out against it as the voice of indignant humanity. Audre Lorde is the voice of the eloquent outsider who speaks in a language that can reach and touch people everywhere.” Her works include:

  • A Burst Of Light
  • The Black Unicorn
  • Between Ourselves
  • Cables To Rage
  • The Cancer Journals
  • The First Cities
  • From A Land Where Other People Live
  • I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities
  • Lesbian Party: An Anthology
  • Need: A Chorale For Black Women Voices
  • The New York Head Shop And Museum
  • Our Dead Behind Us: Poems
  • Sister Outsider: Essays And Speeches
  • The Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance: Poems
  • Undersong: Chosen Poems Old And New
  • Uses Of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power
  • Woman Poet—The East
  • Zami: A New Spelling of My Name