The following five books all work as introductions to Lorde's brilliance. She was utterly fearless-, and finding where to start in one's quest to read her work can be a daunting task. 'Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country,' she wrote in A Burst of Light.

In the arenas of race and sex, she was fearless. She would revisit this theme in her essay collection A Burst of Light, published in 1988, just a few years before her death in 1992 due to complications of liver cancer. She had a gift, however, of turning immense vulnerability into strength, and rather than shy away from discussing this diagnosis and the way it physically altered her body, she campaigned-most notably in her 1980 work The Cancer Journals-to eliminate the shame of breast cancer and amputation. In 1978, Lorde detected a lump in her breast, a discovery that led, eventually, to a mastectomy.

While her writing was blisteringly political, it was also deeply personal. Her books-among them Sister Outsider, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and her Collected Poems-all sought to pierce 'the tyrannies of silence.' One of her greatest subjects was crumbling the twin pillars of racism and sexism: 'Within this country, where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.' And there are so many silences to be broken,' she wrote in 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.' She fought especially hard to create space for Black and queer women in that movement, to 'bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

Through her activism and work-speeches, essays, poems, journals-she was a tireless revolutionary in the fight for women's rights. Over the next sixty years, she became an undeniable icon, a self-styled 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet' synonymous with intersectional feminism. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Audre Lorde was born in 1934 in Harlem.

Audre lorde biomythography