Poet, essayist, and novelist Audre Lorde was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde on February 18, 1934, in New York City. Her parents were immigrants from Grenada. The youngest of three sisters, she was raised in Manhattan and attended Catholic school. While she was still in high school, her first poem appeared in Seventeen magazine. Lorde received her BA from Hunter College and an MLS from Columbia University. She served as a librarian in New York public schools from 1961 through 1968. In 1962, Lorde married Edward Rollins. They had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathon, before divorcing in 1970.

Her first volume of poems was published in 1968. In the same year, she became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she discovered a love of teaching. At Tougaloo, she also met her long-term partner, Frances Clayton.

In 1995, Poet Adrienne Rich said of The Black Unicorn that “Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity.”

Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer and chronicled her struggles in her first prose collection, The Cancer Journals in 1980, which won the Gay Caucus Book of the Year award for 1981.

In the 1980s, Lorde and writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She was also a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa, an organization that worked to raise concerns about women under apartheid.

Audre Lorde was a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from 1991–92. She died of breast cancer in 1992.