Audre Lorde 1934 – 1992

Audre Lorde was an American Black feminist philosopher, poet, and essayist whose work shaped contemporary thinking on race, gender, sexuality, and difference. Sister Outsider and the autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name developed her insistence that difference is not the obstacle to but the precondition of liberation, and that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Her essay The Uses of the Erotic recovered the erotic, against its sentimental and pornographic distortions, as a deep source of moral and political knowledge that the disciplined Black woman must claim as her own.

Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City in February 1934, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants from Grenada and Barbados. She took her bachelor's at Hunter College in 1959 and her master's in library science at Columbia in 1961, worked as a public-school librarian, and from 1968 — after a residency at Tougaloo College in Mississippi — moved into academic teaching at Lehman College, John Jay, and Hunter, where she was Thomas Hunter Professor of English from 1985 until her death.

Her poetry collections include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), Coal (1976), the central The Black Unicorn (1978), and the late Our Dead Behind Us (1986). Her prose works are the cancer-illness journal The Cancer Journals (1980), the 'biomythography' Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), the essay collection Sister Outsider (1984), and the late memoir A Burst of Light (1988); with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981.

Lorde named herself 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet' and made the irreducible difference of overlapping identities the engine of her thought; her central claim that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house' and her essays on the uses of the erotic, the transformation of silence, and self-care as political warfare became foundational texts of intersectional feminism, womanism, and queer theory. She died of metastatic breast cancer in St Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, in November 1992.