Audre Lorde was born in 1934 in New York to Grenadian parents. She attended Hunter College for her Bachelor’s degree and then learned a Master’s in Library Science from Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, she worked as a librarian. She married Edward Rollins and had two children. In 1968, Lorde was the writer-in-residence at Tougalou College in Mississippi and released her first poetry collection, The First Cities. At Tougalou, Lorde met her eventual partner Frances Clayton, and shortly after her tenure as the writer-in-residence, she divorced Rollins. Lorde continued to teach at Hunter College, John Jay College, and other locations.
In the 1970s, Lorde published...