Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934, to parents who had emigrated from Grenada, and grew up in Harlem during the Depression. She earned a bachelor's degree at Hunter College and a master's in library science at Columbia University in 1961, and worked as a librarian in Mount Vernon, New York. In 1968 she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Mississippi. Her books of poetry include The First Cities (1968), From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), which was nominated for a National Book Award, and The Black Unicorn (1978). She described herself as "a Black feminist lesbian mother poet."

Her political thought lives mainly in essays and speeches collected in Sister Outsider (1984). In "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," given at a 1979 New York University Institute for the Humanities conference marking thirty years since Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, she said she had agreed to comment on papers "dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women." Her argument was that difference "must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic," and that survival means learning "to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures." Methods drawn from the order being opposed could not, in her view, bring real change: "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

She pressed the point in "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," delivered at Amherst College in April 1980. There she described a "mythical norm," in America "usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure," with which "the trappings of power reside." People outside it, she argued, often single out one way in which they differ, treat it as the primary cause of all oppression, and forget other distortions around difference, some of which they may practice themselves. Her claim was that race, sex, class, age and sexuality have to be examined together.

The Cancer Journals (1980) recorded her treatment for breast cancer, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) told her early life. With the writer Barbara Smith she founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in the 1980s, and A Burst of Light followed in 1988. She served as New York State Poet in 1991 and 1992. She died of liver cancer in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, on November 17, 1992, at 58.