When was audre lorde born

Her poetry embodied themes of emotions including love, fear, racial and sexual oppression, survival, and urban struggle. She was a prolific writer who explored the feelings and suffering of marginalized groups. She also focused on her experiences as a woman, a lesbian, an African American, and a mother.

Her poetry reflected all of these experiences as well as events unfolding over time. Her writing described the necessity for social action again racism and sexism. In , Lourde was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the spring of that same year, she became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically black institution in Mississippi. It was at Tougaloo that she met her companion, Frances Clayton. Lorde and Rollins divorced in Lorde published her first volume of poems, The First Cities , in That same year, she earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Mississippi.

There, she discovered her love of teaching and met Frances Clayton, a professor of psychology and her partner until Lorde continued writing prolifically through the s and s, exploring the intersections of race, gender, and class, as well as examining her own identity within a global context. Her collection, The Black Unicorn , was inspired by a trip to Benin with her children. In it, she drew strength from a spiritual connection with the goddesses of African mythology.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in , Lorde found that the ordeals of cancer treatment and mastectomy were shrouded in silence for women, and found them even further isolating as a Black lesbian woman. Lorde felt that the narratives of coping and healing she did encounter were designed solely for white, heterosexual women. In an effort to combat this silence and to foster connection with other lesbians and women of color facing the same struggle, Lorde offered a raw portrait of her own pain, suffering, reflection, and hope in The Cancer Journals Kitchen Table was devoted to promoting feminists of color and their writings.

Lorde was also a founding member of Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, an organization that advocated on behalf of women living under apartheid. In , the Publishing Triangle association instituted the Audre Lorde Award for distinguished works of lesbian poetry. John the Divine in New York City in Shortly before her death, she participated in an African naming ceremony in which she took the name Gamba Adisa.

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