There could never be too many biographies of Audre Lorde. What follows are excerpts from two chapters of my own forthcoming biography, wherein each of the fifty-eight chapters is another approach to telling the life story of this cosmic force, this Black lesbian feminist poet warrior mother. “Prologue” and “Portrait” (which are also titles of two of Lorde’s poems) offer first a meditation on what is at stake in the intergenerational legacy, and then a peek into some of Lorde’s first attempts to represent herself in author’s statements and bios. Meditating on graphite, a black, extracted, glittering quantum mineral, I invite you to wonder with me what it means to make a mark on this planet in the multilayered tradition of Audre Lorde.
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Originally published in Mousse 88
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was born in New York to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still in high school. Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and her MLS from Columbia University. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She had two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins, a white gay man, before they divorced in 1970. In 1972 Lorde met her longtime partner, Frances Clayton. She also began teaching as a poet in residence at Tougaloo College, Mississippi. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy went on to inform her life and work. Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984). Lorde’s early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), with that last nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including The New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. Lorde’s later poems were often assembled from personal journals. She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second wave feminism, the civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. Lorde was also a noted prose writer. The Cancer Journals (1980) is regarded as a major work of illness narrative. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1983) was presented as a “biomythography” of the author. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) collected Lorde’s nonfiction prose and has become a canonical text in Black studies, women’s studies, and queer theory. Another collection of essays, A Burst of Light (1988), won the National Book Award. In 1981 Lorde and fellow writers Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. In 1984, she started a visiting professorship at the Free University in Berlin. Lorde also became increasingly concerned over the plight of Black women in South Africa under apartheid, creating Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa in the late 1980s. Lorde’s honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English at John Jay College and Hunter College, Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991 to 1992, the year of her untimely death. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde was published in 1997.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an activist, critic, poet, scholar, and educator. A self-described “queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist,” she is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), Dub: Finding Ceremony (Duke University Press, 2020), M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2018), and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016), and coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016). She holds a PhD in English, African and African American studies, and women and gender studies from Duke University and is the cofounder of Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study, and produce films with a Black feminist ethic. Her latest book, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, a biography of Audre Lorde, is out in August 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin Books. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.