Audre Lorde

1934-1992

Writer, Teacher

Audre Lorde survived breast cancer and tackled liver cancer. Disease took her life, but her words allow her spirit to continue fighting today.

Lorde was a poet and essayist; she was a lesbian and a teacher. But in the minds of many, she was simply a woman who fought -- for life and for liberation.

She grew up in Harlem, the daughter of West Indian parents. She was a librarian for a while and taught English for more than a decade. In 1979, Lorde spoke at the first lesbian and gay rights march in Washington, D. C.

Much of her writing, though, was written during her fourteen-year battle with cancer. "The struggle with cancer now informs all my days," she wrote for her 1987 book A Burst of Light.

There is no better way to get a glimpse of Lorde's writing style than to read her work.

"We are Lesbians and Gays of Color surviving in a country that defines human -- when it concerns itself with the question at all -- as straight and white," Lorde writes in a chapter about lesbian parenting. "Our daughter and son are in their twenties now. They are both warriors, and the battlefields shift: the war is the same. It stretches from the brothels of Southeast Asia to the blood-ridden alleys of Capetown to the incinerated Lesbian in Berlin ... and grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs shot dead in the projects of New York."

Lorde continues, "[My children] are in the process of choosing their own weapons, and no doubt some of those weapons will feel completely alien to me. Yet I trust them, deeply, because they were raised to be their own woman, their own man, in struggle, and in the service of all our futures."

As an African-American lesbian woman, Lorde raised the weapon of her words against all sorts of discrimination because, she said, "liberation is not the private province of any one particular group."