It might puzzle some why Lorde, a gay Black woman, would move from Harlem, the neighborhood of her birth, so closely associated with her work, to Staten Island - then, as now, the whitest and most politically conservative of New York City’s boroughs.
All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.
Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. And it seemed, for me, very symbolic-one of the ways in which we are both connected and letting go.Ĭharacteristically, Lorde challenged her listeners: “What you get from this poem, I ask that you hold and use.” On a trip to San Francisco, not too long ago, I happened to look down and realized that the plane was circling the bridge and therefore, circling my house. I live quite close to the Verrazano Bridge, which is the bridge that connects Staten Island with the rest of New York City….
Lorde introduced one of the poems she would read this way: As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, Audre Lorde reading her poems with comment in the Recording Laboratory on Feb.In May 1985, Audre Lorde participated in a daylong event sponsored by Sisters in Solidarity against Apartheid, a student group at the University of California Berkeley.Lorde was a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa. She served as a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and taught at John Jay College and Hunter College. From 1961-1968, Lorde was a librarian in New York public schools. Lorde received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Artists Public Service Program, as well as the Broadside Poets Award from Broadside Press, the Borough of Manhattan President’s Award for literary excellence, and the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. She is also the author of five volumes of prose, including The Cancer Journals (1980), which won the 1982 Gay Caucus Book of the Year award and A Burst of Light (1988), which won a National Book Award. She is the author of 12 poetry collections, including Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997). Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934.
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