Hi, I’m Damary Rodriguez, Language Access Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement During today’s episode we’re going to learn about Audre Lorde who described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Audre was also a survivor of sexual assault whose work speaks to the importance of struggle for liberation among oppressed peoples and of organizing in coalition across differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age and ability. OPTIONAL: As a warning, this episode contains descriptions of racial and sexual violence. Please take care of yourself while listening. Audre Lorde was born in 1934 in New York City to Caribbean immigrant parents. She was raised in the city and attended catholic schools before attending Hunter High School. Audre loved poetry even as a youth and published her first poem while in high school. She then went on to earn her bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and a Masters in Library Science from Columbia University. After earning her degrees, Audre worked as a librarian throughout most of the 1960s in New York City and in Mount Vernon, New York. In 1968, Lorde received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities, was also published that year. After this, she went on to write many works of poetry and prose including: A Burst Of Light The Black Unicorn Between Ourselves Cables To Rage The Cancer Journals From A Land Where Other People Live I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities Lesbian Party: An Anthology Need: A Chorale For Black Women Voices The New York Head Shop And Museum Our Dead Behind Us: Poems Sister Outsider: Essays And Speeches The Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance: Poems Undersong: Chosen Poems Old And New Uses Of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power Woman Poet—The East Zami: A New Spelling of My Name In 1980, Lorde also published The Cancer Journals which chronicled her battle with breast cancer. After the Cancer Journals, Lorde released Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This book was particularly groundbreaking as it created a new genre: biomythography. It was described by publishers as “combining elements of history, biography and myth.” This novel was also groundbreaking because Lorde wrote about the times she was sexually harassed and assaulted. While it is very brief, a survivor writing their own story is truly powerful. In 1981 Lorde helped found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press along with Barbara Smith and Cherrie Moraga. Kitchen Table was dedicated to elevating the writings of Black feminists. You may have heard of Barbara Smith as she was part of the Combahee River Collective. Audre Lorde was a contributor to the Collective. In addition to publishing poetry and prose, and founding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Lorde continued to teach throughout most of the 1980s. She was a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College of the City University of New York. In 1991, Lorde was named the Poet Laureate for New York State. Governor Mario Cuomo said of Lorde: “Her imagination is charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice…She cries out against it as the voice of indignant humanity. Audre Lorde is the voice of the eloquent outsider who speaks in a language that can reach and touch people everywhere.” Sadly, Audre Lorde passed away the following year. Lorde’s legacy lives on not only through her writing but the movements she has contributed to. I’ll leave you with this powerful quote: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Audre Lorde, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosphy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.