ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Audre Lorde
The Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, warrior Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a native New Yorker and daughter of immigrants. Both her activism and her published work speak 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. An internationally recognized activist and artist, Audre Lorde was the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, which conferred the mantle of New York State poet for 1991-93. In designating her New York State’s Poet Laureate, Governor Mario Cuomo observed: “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.”
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents’ native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, left behind by her older sisters. On she stumbles through teenage hardships — suicide, abortion, hunger, a Christmas spent alone — until she emerges into happiness: an oasis of friendship in Washington Heights, an affair in a dirty factory in Connecticut, and, finally, a journey down to the heat of Mexico, discovering sex, tenderness, and suppers of hot tamales and cold milk. This is Audre Lorde’s story. It is a rapturous, life-affirming tale of independence, love, work, strength, sexuality and change, rich with poetry and fierce emotional power.
LISTEN HERE:
In this episode we talk about everything Audre Lorde — language and silence, anger and love, intersectionality, bermuda shorts and dungarees, historical texts and literary ones, and how every woman Audre ever loved left “her print” on her. Listen to the crew as we rediscover one of the great books of African American Studies.
WHAT ELSE THE SPOILERS ARE READING:
- Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race by Kennetta Hammond Perry
- Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by Michael Bennett and Dave Zirin
