Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde (New York, 1934 - Saint Croix, 1992) was a Black American poet, essayist and civil rights activist. A lesbian feminist, she wrote from within the Black feminist tradition of the late twentieth century, and her way of thinking about how race, gender, sexuality and class overlap remains a key reference for anyone studying intersectionality.

The daughter of Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Grenada, she grew up in Harlem. She learned to read at the age of four and wrote her first poems while still at primary school. She studied at Hunter College and, in 1954, spent a formative year at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a period she later described as one of affirmation and renewal. In 1961 she earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University and worked as a librarian before turning to teaching. In 1978 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, an experience that shaped much of her later writing.

Her poetry, including The First Cities (1968) and Cables to Rage, combines technical control with raw anger at social injustice. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name blends memoir and myth, while Sister Outsider gathers essays on racism, sexism and heterosexist oppression. Lorde rejected the idea that some oppressions matter more than others. In her view, racism, classism, sexism and homophobia grow from the same failure to see difference as a creative force. This is why she distrusted mere tolerance and argued instead for interdependence among different people. She also warned that the patterns of domination can be absorbed internally, so resisting them demands personal reckoning as well as political struggle.

In 1984 she began a visiting professorship in West Berlin that lasted until 1992. There she became a mentor to Black German women, among them May Ayim, Ika Hügel-Marshall and Helga Emde, and her influence helped launch the Afro-German movement. Together with other activists, she helped popularise the term 'Afro-German'. Her insistence on language as a form of resistance rather than violence still shapes feminist theory, postcolonial studies and debates about intersectionality.