Audre Lorde

Who Was Audre Lorde?

Audre Lorde attended Hunter College and Columbia University and was a librarian for several years
before publishing her first volume of poetry, First Cities, in 1968. More successful collections
followed, including From a Land Where Other People Live (1973) and The Black Unicorn (1978).
Lorde also wrote the memoirs The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1988).

Early Life

Audre Geraldine Lorde was born on February 18, 1934, in New York City, and went on to become a
leading African American poet and essayist who gave voice to issues of race, gender and sexuality.
Lorde's love of poetry started at a young age, and she began writing as a teenager. She attended
Hunter College, working to support herself through school. After graduating in 1959, she went on to
get a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University in 1961.

For most of the 1960s, Lorde worked as a librarian in Mount Vernon, New York, and in New York
City. She married attorney Edwin Rollins in 1962. The couple had two children, Elizabeth and
Jonathan, and later divorced.

First Work Published

Lorde's life changed dramatically in 1968. Her first volume of poetry, First Cities, was published, and,
that same year, she left her job as a head librarian at Town School Library in New York City. Also in
1968, Lorde taught a poetry workshop at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, witnessing first-hand the
deep racial tensions in the South. There she would publish her second volume of poetry entitled
Cables to Rage (1970), which took on themes of love, deceit and family, and which also addressed
her own sexuality in the poem, "Martha." She would later teach at John Jay College and Hunter
College in New York.

Lorde's third volume of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), earned a lot of praise
and was nominated for a National Book Award. In this volume she explored issues of identity as well
as concerns about global issues. Her next work, New York Head Shop and Museum (1975), was more
overtly political than her earlier poem collections.