Audre Lorde
Lorde was born and raised in New York City as the child of West Indian immigrants. She was educated at Hunter College, also spending a year at the National University of Mexico. For more than a decade she was head librarian at Town School Library in New York. Then, in 1968, she published her first volume of poetry and spent a transformative year as poet in residence at historically black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Her next book, Cables to Rage (1970), acknowledged her homosexuality.