Tuesday, February 18, 2014 will mark the 80th birthday anniversary of
Audre Lorde, the self defined Black Lesbian Feminist Mother Warrior
Poet. In her short lifetime in the physical form, Sister Lorde published
ten volumes of poetry and five works of prose, including Zami: A New
Spelling of My Name; The Cancer Journals, A Burst of Light, Sister
Outsider, Our Dead Behind Us, From a Land Where Other People Live,
Cables to Rage, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, and The
Marvelous Arithmetics Of Distance. She is credited with co-founding,
with Barbara Smith, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S.
publisher by, for, and about women of color. In her lifetime, Sister
Lorde was a recipient of many distinguished honors and awards, including
being named the New York State Poet Laureate from 1991-1993. Towards
the very end of her life, she was given and fully embraced the African
name Gamba Adisa, which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning
Clear.” She died on November 19, 1992, after a 14-year battle with
breast cancer, which metastasized to her liver.
She is
recognized as one of the most important radical Black feminists of the
past half century by Drs. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Johnnetta Betsch Cole,
and the late Rudolph P. Byrd in their edited volume I Am Your Sister:
Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde.
On February
18, 2014, The Feminist Wire will take a bold step by launching a global (US, Europe,
and the Caribbean) two-week online forum to celebrate Sister Lorde’s
life and living legacy, which continuously touches hundreds of thousands
of people around the world. We will feature critical essays, personal
reflections, poetry, love notes, and videos by a wide range of diverse
people spanning age, race, gender, ethnicity, gender identity,
spirituality, sexual orientation, national origin. Some of them knew her
personally and others only recently encountered her through her written
and spoken words...
They contributors include, but are not limited to - Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, Michelle Parkerson, Dagmar Schultz, Nancy Bereano, asha bandele, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Opal Moore, Thomas Glave, Robert Reid-Pharr, J. Bob Alotta, The Audre Lorde Project, Cheryl Boyce Davies, A collective of Black German women ~ Marion Kraft (Lorde's German Translator), Ria Cheatom, Ika Huegel-Marshall, Cassandra Ellerbe-Dueck~, students from my graduate and undergraduate Audre Lorde: The Life and Work of A Silence Breaker seminar at Temple University, students from Spelman College's Audre Lorde Archival seminar, Melinda Goodman, Lester Olson, Lyndon K. Gill, Darnell L. Moore, Valerie Bridgeman, Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and many more.
TFW will also feature two intimate video interviewers with Lorde's daughter, Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, M.D. (February 21, 2014) and her partner in the latter years of her life, Gloria I Jospeh, Ph.D. (February 28, 2014) in our "Feminists We Love" column.
We hope you will join The Feminist Wire over the next two weeks during our amazing Lordean journey. http://thefeministwire.com
In Honor of Audre Lorde's Living Legacy!
Aishah
Organizer and Lead Editor, TFW's Audre Lorde Forum
"The revolution begins with the self, in the self." - Toni Cade Bambara
"Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become character Watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
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