Audre Geraldine Lorde, a critically acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist who also wrote under the pseudonym Rey Domini, was born in 1924 in New York City of West Indian parents, the youngest of three daughters. Following a precocious childhood, when she learned to read and write at the age of four and wrote her first poem at high school, Lorde attended Hunter College and graduated in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree. In 1961 she received a master’s in library science from Columbia University and worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library until 1963. In 1962 she married a white attorney and had two children before divorcing in 1970. From 1966 to 1968, she worked as a head librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where patrons knew her as the “librarian who wrote”. She had also worked as a factory worker, social worker, ghost writer, x-ray technician, medical clerk and arts and crafts supervisor. In 1968 she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and in the spring of the same year she became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College, Mississippi. This turning point in her poetic career was followed by other awards and honors, including another National Endowment for the Arts grant in1981, the Creative Artists Public Service award (1972 and 1976), a nomination for the National Book Award for poetry (1974 for From a Land Where Other People Live), the Broadside Poets Award (Detroit, 1975), the Woman of the Year award (Staten Island Community College, 1975), the Borough of Manhattan President’s Award for literary excellence (1987), and the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. She was also declared Poet Laureate of New York in 1991.

Despite being so nearsighted as to be declared legally blind and facing a fourteen-year battle against the breast cancer that finally killed her, Lorde worked intensively with women of color in many different countries and was one of the founders of Kitchen Table—Women of Color Press and the “Sisterhood” in support of South African women. Describing herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” she fought in her work for justice on these minority fronts, while her writing bears strong marks of influence by her contemporary feminist, African-American and gay movements. As the poet herself says,  “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

(Source: www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lorde/lorde.htm)