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Women's History Month Challenge 2022: Challenge 4

Welcome to Day 4 of the Women's History Month Challenge!

Complete the challenge and be entered in a raffle to win a $25 gift card

to the MCC bookstore!

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde, in full Audre Geraldine Lorde, also called Gamba Adisa or Rey Domini, (born February 18, 1934, New York, New York — died November 17, 1992, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands), was an American poet, essayist, and autobiographer known for her passionate writings on lesbian feminism and racial issues.

The daughter of Grenadan parents, Lorde attended Hunter College and received a B.A. in 1959 and a master's degree in library science in 1961. She married in 1962 and wrote poetry while working as a librarian at Town School in New York; she also taught English at Hunter College.

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde CC-BY-SA-2.0

Lorde’s early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. “I have a duty,” Lorde once stated, “to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.”

Lorde was a noted prose writer as well as poet. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals (1980), is regarded as a major work of illness narrative. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde confronts the possibility of death. Lorde’s 1982 novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, was described by its publishers as a “biomythography, combining elements of history, biography and myth.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) collected Lorde’s nonfiction prose and has become a canonical text in Black studies, women’s studies, and queer theory. Another collection of essays, A Burst of Light (1988), won the National Book Award.

 

Day 4 Challenge: Use MCC Search to find out more about Audre Lorde's life.

5 Steps to complete the challenge:

  1. Search for the following using MCC Search on the library homepage: Audre Lorde
  2. Use the Research Starter at the top of the page to answer the first four questions of today’s challenge.
  3. To access the full text of the research starter, you’ll need to login to your library account. When prompted to do so, use your A# (make sure you use a capital A) and library password. Your default password is your date of birth in this format: mmddyyyy
  4. Once you complete the first four questions, return to the MCC Search results by clicking the back button.
  5. Locate the total number of search results at the top of the results list.

Answer the challenge questions by filling out the entry form on the right, or view the form in a larger format.