Heterocetera audre lorde biography

Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934. She made the difficult decision to undergo a mastectomy.

I read Zami on my own, then essays in Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals, and met a Lorde who was shameless, aggressive, formidable, and unabashedly queer. Zami is a semi-fictional, at times completely fabulated account of Lorde’s coming-of-age. She then builds up to the unjust reality of “wide futures promised” that can’t be fulfilled because “I am woman and not white.”

'Afterimages' (1982)

Divided into four sections, “Afterimages” is among Lorde’s longer works.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was published in 1982. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. Three people died and over 3,500 people became homeless. I remember Lorde the flawed. She also became New York State's poet laureate in 1991.

Lorde, who passed away in St. Croix in 1992, continued to raise her voice on essential issues throughout her lifetime, saying: “I write because I am a warrior and my poetry is my primary weapon.”

Here are just a few of Lorde’s most inspiring works:

'Coal' (1968)

First appearing in her 1968 debut collection The First Cities, “Coal” might be Lorde’s most defining work.

They had two children together. Gumbs focuses on Lorde’s poetry, writing, theories of health and well-being, theory of Earth and the cosmos, and the role of technology in her work and life. New fields like African American studies and women’s studies broadened the topics scholars were addressing and brought attention to groups that previously had been rarely discussed.

Around the age of twelve, she struggled to find poems that expressed her emotions, so she started writing her own poetry.

After high school, Audre attended Hunter College in New York City. De Veaux brilliantly weaves in the stories of a vibrant cast of characters who enriched Lorde’s life. Survival is a Promise exists in a lineage that begins with Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, published in 1982.

She would read and memorize poems. Two years later, Audre met Frances Clayton, a white psychology professor, who became her long-time romantic partner. They settled in Staten Island, where Audre continued to write and teach.

Audre did not shy away from difficult topics in her poems. The Lorde I met in college was a legend, but it would be years before I would dive deeper into her work and life.

It showed me how what Lorde left us has taken on “a life of its own.” Gumbs’ book is a biography of Lorde’s literary lives and afterlives.

How do we remember our legends?

What do we learn from what they left behind? 

Gumbs takes up these ambitious questions and more in her celebratory biography of the “Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, warrior, poet,” essayist, and activist, Audre Lorde.

There is barely any discussion of Lorde’s struggles with mental health, nor her use of amphetamines and cannabis during her young adult years, working dead-end jobs to gain a foothold, finish school, and ultimately become a librarian and later artist. From a Land Where Other People Live from 1972 was nominated for a National Book Award.