Audre Lorde author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, sous licence CC BY 2.0.

Audre Lorde

Né(e): February 18, 1934 – New York City, New York, United States

Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, and activist whose work examined race, gender, sexuality, class, and power. Her most influential books include Sister Outsider, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and The Black Unicorn. She won the 1989 American Book Award for A Burst of Light.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

Audre Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934, the daughter of Caribbean immigrant parents, and grew up in Harlem in a household shaped by discipline, language, and racial tension. From an early age, she turned to poetry as a way of naming experience that ordinary speech could not fully hold. She attended Hunter College High School, earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in 1959, and completed a master’s degree in library science at Columbia University in 1961. Before she became widely known as a writer and public intellectual, she worked as a librarian and teacher, occupations that reflected her lasting commitment to literacy, access, and public life. Her emergence as an author did not follow a digital path; her readership grew through magazines, small presses, classroom teaching, poetry readings, and activist networks.

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Citations

quote
Your silence will not protect you
-The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
quote
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought
-Poetry Is Not a Luxury
quote
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive
-A Litany for Survival
quote
I am black because I come from the earth's inside Take my word for jewel in your open light
-Coal
quote
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children
-Power
quote
I am fourteen and my skin has betrayed me
-Hanging Fire
quote
There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear
-Who Said It Was Simple
quote
I have been woman for a long time beware my smile
-A Woman Speaks
quote
My mother had two faces and a frying pot where she cooked up her daughters into girls before she fixed our dinner
-From the House of Yemanjá

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Voix de la Communauté

"My hero, Audre Lorde was a groundbreaking poet and innovator who taught me to embrace my own contradictions"

Jackie Kay ((

"Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, librarian, feminist, and equal rights activist"

NMAAHC ((

"Audre Lorde Broke the Silence"

The New Republic ((

"Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, and autobiographer known for her passionate writings on lesbian feminism and racial issues"

Britannica ((

"The poetry of Audre Lorde often explores the tensions and joys of her overlapping identities as a black woman, a feminist, and a lesbian"

Radcliffe Institute ((

"The quantum, eternal force of Audre Lorde"

The Boston Globe ((

"Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices"

Poetry Foundation ((

"A ‘cosmic’ biography tries to see Audre Lorde as she saw herself"

The Washington Post ((

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