"Lorde, best known for her [poetry] and essays, leaves us with this ... autobiography of her early years as a writer, and as a struggling black lesbian in NYC. Slowly, through gentle inflections of her Grenadian roots and development of the ideas of Caricou society, she stitches together a number of very personal 'mythographies,' ultimately weaving a ... telling of her life"--Review on Amazon.com.

"A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. Her incisive essays and passionate poetry-alive with sensuality, vulnerability, and rage-remain indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies. This essential reader showcases twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems, selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay. The essays include "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "I Am Your Sister," and excerpts from the National Book Award-winning A Burst of Light. The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including National Book Award nominee The Land Where Other People Live. As Gay writes in her astute introduction, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde celebrates "an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last.""--

Featuring contributions from an award-winning, bestselling group of Black voices, past and present, this powerful poetry anthology elicits vital conversations about race, belonging, history and faith to highlight Black joy and pain.