Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Black History Month

Staff recommendations, guest essays, and curated reading lists.

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature.

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.

These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is..."

"[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware." New York Times

"[Sister Outsider is] another indication of the depth of analysis that black women writers are contributing to feminist thought." Barbara Christian, PhD, author of Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers

"An eye-opener" Publishers Weekly

A writer, activist, and mother of two, Audre Lorde grew up in 1930s Harlem. She earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State's Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993. She is the author of twelve books, including Zami and The Black Unicorn. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992.