Knowra Audre Lorde Audre Lorde Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was an American poet, essayist, and activist whose writing examined race, gender, sexuality, class, and power. She described herself as a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, warrior, and poet.
Intersectionality : A framework for understanding how social categories and systems of power interact to shape experience. Lorde analyzed race, gender, sexuality, and class together rather than as separate struggles.
The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House : A 1979 speech by Audre Lorde criticizing the exclusion of race and class from feminist debate. It states her challenge to feminist movements that reproduce the hierarchies they oppose.
Adrienne Rich : An American poet and feminist essayist whose work addressed gender, sexuality, and political power. Rich’s dialogue with Lorde illuminates their shared commitments and disagreements about difference.
Coal : Audre Lorde’s 1976 poetry collection, addressing race, desire, language, and identity. This collection brought Lorde’s poetry to a wider audience and presents her early lyric voice.
Black feminism : A tradition of thought and activism centering Black women’s experiences and challenging interlocking forms of oppression. Its concerns and political practice strongly inform Lorde’s essays and activism.
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power : A 1978 essay by Audre Lorde arguing that the erotic can be a source of knowledge and power. It shows how Lorde translated her idea of the erotic into a feminist argument.
Barbara Smith : An American Black lesbian feminist writer, critic, and organizer who helped establish the Combahee River Collective. Smith and Lorde were influential in overlapping Black feminist literary and political networks.
The Black Unicorn : Audre Lorde’s 1978 poetry collection, drawing on African mythology, Black womanhood, and transformation. Its poems make myth and Black female identity central to Lorde’s poetic world.
Lesbian feminism : A feminist movement and body of thought shaped by lesbian lives, politics, and critiques of heterosexual norms. Lorde made lesbian identity central to her accounts of intimacy, power, and liberation.
Poetry Is Not a Luxury : A 1977 essay by Audre Lorde presenting poetry as a means of articulating possibilities and change. It explains why Lorde treated poetic imagination as necessary to political action.
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