American poet, essayist, librarian, and one of the most original voices in late-20th-century American feminist thought; self-described, in the compressed formulation she made famous, as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." Born in Harlem to Caribbean immigrant parents, educated at Hunter College and Columbia's library school, Lorde worked as a librarian through the 1960s while publishing the first of twelve collections of poetry and eventually moved into teaching — at John Jay, at Hunter (where the chair she held is now named for her), and, in her last years, in a traveling lecturer's life shaped by her long illness with breast cancer.
Her essays, collected in Sister Outsider (1984), have become canonical in feminist and Black studies syllabi and hold up to rereading with unusual durability. The short pieces — "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," "Uses of the Erotic," "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" — each compress a sustained argument into a few pages of prose that refuses the then-standard academic feminist idiom in favor of something closer to the cadences of sermon and poem. The central moves are now commonplaces of feminist thought in part because Lorde made them: that difference among women (race, class, sexuality, age) is not an obstacle to solidarity but the ground on which real solidarity must be built; that the dominant culture's vocabulary cannot be what dismantles domination; that silence does not protect; that the erotic, properly understood, is a source of knowledge and power rather than of distraction from the political.
The Cancer Journals (1980) is her account of her own breast cancer and mastectomy, and one of the most unflinching American illness memoirs of its century — a sustained refusal of the prosthetic-breast reconstruction that would have made her visually unremarkable, read as a refusal of every pressure to perform wholeness for the comfort of observers. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), her "biomythography," invented a form for a life that neither memoir nor fiction nor myth could adequately hold. Lorde's collected essays, collected poems (2000, posthumous), and The Cancer Journals together form one of the indispensable 20th-century bodies of American feminist writing.