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Audre Lorde (1954-1992)

LINKS

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/AudreLorde.html

This link connects you to the Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color web site. Here you will find a bibliography of Lorde criticism, a biography of the poet's life, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lorde/lorde.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Audre Lorde.

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=314

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Audre Lorde including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

BIOGRAPHY

The youngest of three daughters born to the West Indian immigrants Frederic Byron and Linda Belmar Lorde, Audre Lorde was raised in Manhattan during the Depression. She attended Catholic grammar schools. From the eighth grade onward, she wrote poetry and identified herself as a poet. From 1954 through 1959, Audre Lorde attended Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. In 1961, she earned an M.A. in library science from Columbia University. Working as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library, she married lawyer Edward Ashley Rollins and together the couple had two children before divorcing in 1970. By 1966, Lorde had assumed the position of head librarian at Town School Library in New York City. Throughout the 1960s, Lorde divided her time between writing, publishing her poetry, working, raising a family, and becoming an activist in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. In 1968 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant that funded her poet-in-residence position at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. It was at Tougaloo that Lorde met her longtime companion Frances Clayton. That year, her inaugural volume of poetry, The First Cities, was published by Poets Press. Two years later, she published Cables to Rage that depicted her lesbian identity in a poem entitled "Martha" based on her relationship with Clayton. Three years later, Broadside Press published From A Land Where Other People Live which was nominated for the National Book Award for 1973. The following year, Lorde's poetry took a decidedly more political turn in New York Head Shop and Museum, followed in 1976 by Coal, which collected poetry from the first two volumes and was published by W. W. Norton. Much of Lorde's lyric poetry explores women's erotic lives. "The erotic," she has commented, "is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling." The Black Unicorn (1978) moved beyond her earlier verse by reading Lorde's contemporary experience as a black lesbian feminist through African mythology. In addition to her poetry of the 1970s, Lorde wrote a series of essays based on her experience as an African American intellectual and as a survivor of breast-cancer. "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," "A Black Lesbian Feminist Experience," and "Breast Cancer: Power vs. Prosthesis" were collected in her 1980 volume The Cancer Journals that won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award for 1981. Lorde's cultural study of her own mastectomy was followed by what she called her "biomythography" in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Six years later, in A Burst of Light, Lorde reflected on her diagnosis of liver cancer, the disease that would eventually take her life in 1992. In her last years, Lorde lived on St. Croix, U. S. Virgin Islands and took the African name Gamba Adisa that translates as "Warrior, She Who Makes Her Meaning Known." Her last publications include Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (1992) and The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993). In addition to receiving several awards throughout her life, Audre Lorde was Poet Laureate of New York in 1991 and a recipient of the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light: Essays. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988.

—. The Cancer Journals. (1980). 2nd ed. San Francisco: Spinsters Press, 1987.

Olson, Lester C. "Liabilities of Language: Audre Lorde Reclaiming Difference." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 84(4):448-70. 1998 Nov.

—. "On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 83(1):49-70. 1997 Feb.

Rowell, Charles H. "Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde." Callaloo. 23(1):52-63. 2000 Winter.

Steele, Cassie Premo. We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Wilson, Anna. Pervasive Fictions: Feminist Narrative and Critical Myth. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER