Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934. She is the author of 12 poetry collections, including Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997). She is also the author of five volumes of prose, including The Cancer Journals (1980), which won the 1982 Gay Caucus Book of the Year award; and A Burst of Light (1988), which won a National Book Award. Lorde received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Artists Public Service Program, as well as the Broadside Poets Award from Broadside Press, the Borough of Manhattan President’s Award for literary excellence, and the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. From 1961-1968, Lorde was a librarian in New York public schools. She served as a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and taught at John Jay College and Hunter College. Lorde was a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa. Audre Lorde died in 1992.
Audio Recordings of Audre Lorde
- As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, Audre Lorde reading her poems with comment in the Recording Laboratory on Feb. 23, 1977
- Audre Lorde and Marge Piercy reading their poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, February 9, 1982