Audre Lorde, born on this day in 1934, was a queer feminist author and socialist activist. Among her works are "The Black Unicorn" and "Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems".

Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants - a father from Barbados and Grenadian mother. She took an interest in poetry and reading at an early age; when asked how she was feeling, Lorde would often respond by reciting a memorized poem.

Lorde attended Hunter College in New York, graduating in 1959. While there, she worked as a librarian and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village.

In 1961, Lorde earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University. During this period, she worked as a public librarian in nearby Mount Vernon, New York, authored poetry, and participated in civil rights demonstrations.

In 1984, Lorde started a visiting professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. During her time in Germany, Lorde became an influential part of the nascent Afro-German movement. Together with a group of black women activists in Berlin, Audre Lorde coined the term "Afro-German" and became a mentor to a number of women, including May Ayim, Ika Hügel-Marshall, and Helga Emde.

Lorde's thinking was emphatically intersectional, criticizing, in her words, "racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism."

Of non-intersectional feminism in the U.S., Lorde famously said "Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

"Without community, there is no liberation."

- Audre lorde