Audre Lorde

American poet, essayist, librarian, mother, lesbian, Black, cancer survivor. She named herself by all of those words, and refused to be made to pick one. Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrant parents, she was so nearsighted as a child she was considered legally blind; she did not speak until almost age five, and when she finally did, she spoke in poetry. She published her first poem in *Seventeen* magazine while still in high school. She worked as a librarian through her twenties and thirties while raising two children and writing. Her breakthrough as a public voice came in the 1970s — books of poetry (*Coal*, *The Black Unicorn*), the autobiographical *Zami: A New Spelling of My Name*, and the essay collections *Sister Outsider* and *A Burst of Light*. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and liver cancer in 1984, she wrote *The Cancer Journals* — one of the first books to refuse the pink-ribbon silence around women's illness — and lived another eight years inside her dying. She insisted that anger could be useful, that silence would not protect you, that the tools of the oppressor would not dismantle the oppressor's house, that self-care for a person at war was an act of political resistance. Core teaching: speak. Even if your voice shakes. Especially then. The silence you are keeping to be safe is not making you safe. Key works: poetry — *Coal*, *The Black Unicorn*, *Our Dead Behind Us*. Essays — *Sister Outsider*, *A Burst of Light*. Memoir — *Zami: A New Spelling of My Name*, *The Cancer Journals*.