“Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde

Excerpt of "Sister Outsider" by Audre Lorde, via Evergreen State College.

Sister Outsider is a collection of fifteen essays and speeches by Black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde. These writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is...”.

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About Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, librarian, feminist, and equal rights activist. Born February 18, 1934 in New York City, Lorde was the youngest of three children of immigrant parents from the West Indies. She was so nearsighted that she was considered legally blind and had a condition known as “tongue-tie” which inhibited her speech development (The Heroine Collective).

She started writing at a young age. By the time she graduated high school, she’d already had a poem published in Seventeen Magazine. She continued to write as she completed her bachelor’s degree at Hunter College and master’s degree at Columbia University. After graduating, she married Edward Rollins, a white gay man. They had two children together before they divorced in 1970. She references her studies in Mexico as the time period of her life where she accepted her identity as a lesbian and poet (NMAAHC).

During her lifetime, Audre Lorde published twelve books. A number of her poems were also published in anthologies. Some of her most well-known works are Cables to Rage (1970), The Black Unicorn (1978), Sister Outsider (1984) and the fictionalized memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Her work was featured in Langston Hughes’ New Negro Poets, a compilation of texts that celebrated the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance (NMAAHC).

Her work reflected her experience as a woman, a lesbian, an African American, and a mother, and all those experiences during the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. Lorde draws on her own experience of oppression, from racism to sexism and classism, to highlight the issues of her time. In both Sister Outsider and other works, Lorde emphasizes that personal identity isn’t shaped by a single factor, but by the various aspects of our unique experiences. Recognizing this is critical to dismantling systemic oppression.

Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977. She reflected on her condition in the book, The Cancer Journals (1980), which was awarded the American Library Association's Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981. She died November 17, 1992 in St. Croix of liver cancer.

Audre Lorde was featured in the Google Doodle this year in honor of her birthday. Her children, Below Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and Jonathan Rollins, share more on their mother’s legacy:

Audre Lorde was a complicated and passionate woman. She was as passionate an educator as she was a fighter. It was very important to her that her work be useful—and she would be enormously gratified to know that her words are now used as a rallying cry of people fighting for justice all over the world. She also loved life: she loved to dance and to hunt for rocks. She loved candy bars. And she loved the people close to her, fiercely.

Reflection Questions

• How do the unique parts of your own identity influence your life?
• What form of creative expression do you use to understand your lived experience?

Learn More

• Watch: Audre Lorde explaining how she became a poet, from A Litany for Survival (Brittanica).
• Read: “Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde” by Alexis De Veaux (Bookshop).
• Watch: Roxane Gay in conversation with Alexis De Veaux on selected works of Audre Lorde (YouTube)
• Watch: “The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde” A tribute to Audre Lorde’s legacy of politics and poetry now available through the Black Lesbian Film Festival (Eventive)