Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 in New York City to immigrant parents from the West Indies. She learned to talk, read, and write somewhere around the age of four and wrote her first poem in eighth grade, which was then published in Seventeen magazine. In 1962, Lorde married a man named Edward Rollins and had two children before they divorced in 1970. However, in 1968 she moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi and met her long-term partner, Frances Clayton. Her earliest poems were often romantic, but in the 1960s became more politically centered due to the amount of civil unrest combined with confusion over her own sexuality. At the time many of her poems were written, more than one-fifth of the nation lived below the poverty line, and the newly introduced television, which presented a highly stereotyped image of the happy American family, led to further oppression of minorities in America (SparkNotes Editors). Throughout literature during the 1950s, there was an overwhelming notion of rebellion when authors such as Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac sought to reject “uniform middle-class culture and sought to overturn the sexual and social conservatism of the period” (SparkNotes Editors). They led a group of nonconformists who, together with many American college students, joined protests against racial segregation, the death penalty, nuclear weapons, and other largely unquestioned topics of American life in the 1950s. I find her work to be extremely compelling and meaningful because of the ways she seeks to surpass notions of patriarchal power, as well as the systematic oppression and denial of human rights of minority groups such as blacks, feminists, women, and lesbians. She uses both feminist and cultural theories in her work ...

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Lorde, Audre. "Coal." Poems and Poets. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2013. .

Lorde, Audre. "The Black Unicorn." The Black Unicorn Poems by Audre Lorde. New York: W. W. Norton &, 1995. 3. Print.

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Social Trends of the 1950s.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 14 Dec. 2013.