Published in 2020
384 pages
Audre Lorde was an American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor, philosopher and civil rights activist. She was a self-described “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” who “dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.” As a poet, she is well known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. As a spoken word artist, her delivery has been called powerful, melodic, and intense by the Poetry Foundation. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness and disability, and the exploration of black female identity.
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017). Gay was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English. In 2018, she left Purdue to become a visiting professor at Yale University. Gay is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective, and the editor for Gay Mag, which was founded in partnership with Medium.
What is this book about?
A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s “intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible” (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.
Self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.
Among the essays included here are:
• “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
• “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
• “I Am Your Sister”
• Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of Light
The poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:
• “Martha”
• “A Litany for Survival”
• “Sister Outsider”
• “Making Love to Concrete”
