Audre Lorde Biography Quotes 39 Report mistakes

39 Quotes
Occup.	Poet
From	USA
Born	February 18, 1934 New York City, USA
Died	November 17, 1992 Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, USA
Aged	58 years

Early Life and Education
Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934 to Caribbean immigrant parents, a mother from Grenada and a father from Barbados. Raised in Harlem as the youngest of three daughters, she gravitated early toward language, memorizing poems and reciting them before she was comfortable speaking in conversation. She attended Hunter College High School, where she refined her voice as a young writer. While still a student, she published a poem in Seventeen magazine, a small but meaningful milestone that confirmed her ambitions. She went on to earn a B.A. from Hunter College in 1959 and an M.L.S. from Columbia University in 1961, training as a librarian at a time when few Black women held such professional posts.

Librarian and Teacher
Throughout the 1960s, Lorde worked as a librarian in New York, including positions in public schools and colleges. The precision, classification, and civic orientation of library work shaped her commitment to access and to the democratic possibilities of literacy. By the late 1960s she began teaching, and in 1968 served as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where her workshops connected poetry to the urgencies of the civil rights era. She later joined the faculty of the City University of New York, teaching at John Jay College and Hunter College, where she encouraged students to write from lived experience and to treat poetry as a tool for inquiry and change.

Poet, Essayist, and Biomythographer
Lorde published her first collection, The First Cities, in 1968, followed by Cables to Rage (1970) and From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), the latter a National Book Award nominee. Coal (1976) consolidated her reputation, and The Black Unicorn (1978) affirmed her range, weaving African and diasporic myth with personal history. In prose, The Cancer Journals (1980) confronted illness and body politics with candor, while Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) offered what she called a biomythography, blending memoir, myth, and history to chronicle her youth, early loves, and the women who formed a sustaining community in midcentury New York. Sister Outsider (1984) gathered essays and speeches that became foundational texts for Black feminism, queer theory, and feminist pedagogy. Later volumes, including Our Dead Behind Us (1986) and A Burst of Light (1988), extended her examination of rage, tenderness, survival, and responsibility.

Identity and Themes
Lorde described herself as Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. She insisted that the intersections of identity were not a burden to be simplified but a source of analytic power. Across poems and essays, she argued that silence and erasure sustain oppression, while difference, named and engaged, enables coalition. She wrote about erotic knowledge as a resource for creativity and freedom, refused the compulsory cosmetic norms imposed on women undergoing cancer treatment, and articulated a critique of racism within feminist spaces and homophobia within Black political movements. Her thought influenced and was sharpened by dialogue with contemporaries such as Adrienne Rich and June Jordan; with Pat Parker she sustained a long exchange about craft, love, and movement work.

Relationships, Family, and Community
In 1962 Lorde married Edwin Rollins; they had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan, and later divorced. During the 1970s she shared her life with Frances Clayton, and in later years with the scholar-activist Gloria I. Joseph, with whom she built a transnational home and intellectual partnership. Lorde maintained close ties with feminist publishers and organizers, supporting Barbara Smith and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which helped build a durable publishing infrastructure for writers too often excluded from mainstream venues.

Public Intellectual and Movement Work
Lorde was an electrifying public speaker. Essays such as Poetry Is Not a Luxury, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, and The Uses of Anger circulated widely in classrooms and movement meetings. Her address The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House challenged academic and feminist establishments to reckon with their exclusions. She appeared in conversation with writers including James Baldwin, bringing literary craft into direct contact with debates about race, gender, sexuality, and democracy. She spoke out against U.S. policy in the Caribbean, wrote about Grenada after the 1983 invasion, and supported anti-apartheid organizing alongside other Black feminists.

International Reach and the Berlin Years
In the 1980s Lorde spent extended time in Berlin as a visiting professor, invited by the activist and publisher Dagmar Schultz. There she encouraged Afro-German women to name their histories and build networks; her mentorship helped catalyze a literary and political movement. She worked closely with writers and organizers including May Ayim and Katharina Oguntoye, whose essays and anthologies documented Afro-German life and challenged the supposed homogeneity of German identity. The period was later memorialized in the documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984, 1992, reflecting the depth of her international collaborations.

Illness, Resolve, and Late Work
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978, Lorde underwent a mastectomy and refused to frame survivorship as either private ordeal or public performance dictated by medical and cosmetic norms. The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light treat illness as a political and poetic crucible, tracking pain, fear, and the disciplined joy of living. Even as cancer recurred in the 1980s, she continued to teach, publish, and organize, sharpening her insistence that speaking what one knows is a form of action. In 1991, Governor Mario Cuomo named her Poet Laureate of New York State, an honor that recognized both artistic achievement and her resonance with readers across communities.

Legacy and Influence
Audre Lorde died in 1992, leaving a body of work that remade the terrain of American literature and social thought. Her poems and essays are widely taught and continue to guide conversations about intersectionality, though she wrote before that term gained currency. Writers, scholars, and organizers have honored her through archives, festivals, and community institutions, including the Audre Lorde Project in New York, which advances the leadership of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming people of color. Posthumous collections and correspondence, including letters with Pat Parker and Adrienne Rich, map the relationships that sustained her work. Across genres and geographies, Lorde modeled how art, rigor, and accountability can be braided into a life of principled dissent and generous coalition.

Our collection contains 39 quotes who is written by Audre, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Truth - Friendship - Love.

Other people realated to Audre: Adrienne Rich (Poet), Mario Cuomo (Politician), James Baldwin (Educator), Barbara Smith (Activist)

Audre Lorde Famous Works