Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde explores themes of race, feminism, and self determination in many of her poems and essays. As a black lesbian women Audre is no stranger to adversity and this celebration of difference is resoundingly heard through her narrative voice. This particular author appealed to me because of her commitment to authenticity in both her writings and in life. The power of her poems is in there ability to tell a deeply personal story that does not seek to hide behind sweeping generalizations about a social or political climate. Yet her adherence to her own personal truth is precisely what touches upon the sweeping truths of the social and political climate. Lorde has made a vast contribution to the African American literary canon with her ideas about personhood and that “‘blackness’ becomes not a privileged figure, sharing space and authority with other dimensions of self-hood in Lorde’s vision of ancestrally founded consciousness.”

In her poems ‘New York City 1970’ and ‘Walking Our Boundaries,’ Lorde talks about the possibilities of salvation or transformation through destruction and rebirth. “I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire,” she exclaims, suggesting that the present state is one beyond salvation by way of rearranging elements. It is a way that must be done away with entirely and replaced with acceptance and love. “My shoulders are dead leaves waiting to be burned to life,” she writes, suggesting that it is in the end of something rotten that salvation can be found. Her contributions to African American literature have been celebrated posthumously across the United States by major journals and papers as well as in Europe and the Caribbean.