The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde

“I have a duty,” Lorde once stated, “to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.” Lorde’s later poems were often assembled from personal journals. Later works, including New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. Lorde’s early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.” Indeed, Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy-as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia-went on to inform her life and work. She also began teaching as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College. In 1972, Lorde met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. She had two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man, before they divorced in 1970. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.” In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing.

People would say, well what do you think, Audre. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: “I used to speak in poetry. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still a student there. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde