Short answers, pulled from the story.
Audre Lorde was born on the 18th of February 1934, in Harlem, New York. She was the youngest of three daughters of Caribbean immigrants; her father was from Barbados and her mother from the island of Carriacou in Grenada. She grew up in Harlem and attended Hunter College High School.
Lorde argued that among people who share the goals of liberation, no single form of oppression should be treated as more important than another. She believed racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, and classism were all interconnected, and that prioritizing one struggle over others undermined the possibility of genuine collective liberation.
Published in the 1984 collection Sister Outsider, the essay argues that working within a racist and patriarchal framework cannot produce genuine, lasting change. Lorde contended that White feminists who denied racial difference among women were reproducing systems of oppression rather than dismantling them.
Lorde began a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin in 1984 and, together with a group of Black women activists, coined the term "Afro-German" that year. She mentored women including May Ayim and Ika Hügel-Marshall, encouraged them to use language as a form of resistance, and helped build a collective Black German identity and epistemology.
Lorde published The Cancer Journals in 1980, drawing on essays and journal entries after her 1978 diagnosis and mastectomy. It won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981. After her cancer spread to her liver, she published A Burst of Light in 1988, documenting the recurrence and her ongoing treatment.
Lorde served as New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992 and received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1992. After her death, Publishing Triangle established the annual Audre Lorde Award for lesbian poetry in 2001. In June 2019, she was among the first inductees on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument, and in April 2022 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on Mercury after her.