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In 1979, at a feminist conference in New York, Audre Lorde stood up on a panel and told the room that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” She was the daughter of Grenadian immigrants, born in Harlem in 1934, a librarian by training, and by then the author of seven books of poems. She described herself as Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, and wrote from all of those positions at once. Her speeches became Sister Outsider, her diary of breast cancer became The Cancer Journals, and her own youth became Zami, a book she called a “biomythography”. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1968–1993 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Audre Lorde published poetry and prose from 1968 until her death in 1992. Her best-known books are Sister Outsider (1984), Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), The Cancer Journals (1980) and the poetry collection The Black Unicorn (1978). Start with Sister Outsider: it holds the speeches people still quote, from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” to “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”.
Where to Start with Audre Lorde
If you want the essays everyone quotes
→ Sister Outsider (1984) — fifteen essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984.
If you want her life story
→ Zami (1982) — Harlem, Mexico and 1950s New York.
If you want her poetry
→ The Black Unicorn (1978) — her most admired collection.
If you want her writing on illness
→ The Cancer Journals (1980) — breast cancer, written from the inside.
11 Audre Lorde Books, in Order
The First Cities
Her first collection, published by the Poets Press in New York in 1968, the year she left her job as a librarian to become writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. The poems are mostly short and lyric, about love, the city and family.
Cables to Rage
Her second collection, published in London by Paul Breman in 1970, the year her marriage ended. It includes “Martha”, the first poem in which she wrote openly about loving a woman.
From a Land Where Other People Live
Published by Broadside Press in Detroit, the poems turn outward to race, anger and the world beyond New York. It was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry in 1974.
Coal
Her first book with a major publisher, W. W. Norton, bringing poems from her small-press collections together with newer work. The title poem opens “I / is the total black” and is about speech coming out of pressure, like a diamond out of coal.
The Black Unicorn
Poems that draw on West African mythology, especially the goddesses of Dahomey and the Yoruba, alongside poems about her mother, her children and lovers. It includes “A Litany for Survival”. Adrienne Rich called them “poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity.”
The Cancer Journals
Diary entries and essays from 1977 to 1979, written around her breast cancer and mastectomy. She refused to wear a prosthesis afterwards and argues why in the final chapter, “Breast Cancer: Power vs. Prosthesis”. It won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year award in 1981.
Zami
Her youth, told with the freedom of fiction: a Harlem childhood with West Indian parents, near-blindness, a year in Mexico, and the lesbian bars of 1950s New York. She called the form “biomythography”, mixing history, biography and myth. “Zami” is a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers. In 2019 the BBC listed it among 100 novels that shaped our world.
Sister Outsider
Fifteen essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984, including “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, “Uses of the Erotic”, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979), “The Uses of Anger” (1981) and her open letter to Mary Daly. The Crossing Press paid her an advance of 100 dollars; the book became one of its biggest successes and is widely taught.
Our Dead Behind Us
Poems written in the years she began teaching in Berlin, with a wider political map: apartheid South Africa, Grenada after the US invasion of 1983, and women she knew in Europe and America.
A Burst of Light
Essays and a long title journal begun in 1984, when she learned that her cancer had spread to her liver. It records her choices about treatment, her time in Berlin and Switzerland, and her argument that caring for herself was a form of self-preservation, not indulgence. It won the American Book Award in 1989.
The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance
Her last collection of new poems, published by W. W. Norton in 1993, the year after her death. Written in her final years on St. Croix and in Berlin, it turns to illness, distance and the people she loved.
In What Order to Read Audre Lorde
Her books do not depend on each other, so there is no wrong order. Still, the prose is the easiest door: Sister Outsider lays out the ideas that run through everything else, Zami tells where they came from, and The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light test them against illness.
For the poetry, read The Black Unicorn first, then go back to Coal. If you want everything, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997) gathers all the collections in one volume.
A reading path
1. Sister Outsider (1984)
2. Zami (1982)
3. The Black Unicorn (1978)
4. The Cancer Journals (1980)
5. A Burst of Light (1988)
Everything Else Audre Lorde Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 10 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Poetry
5
5 books · 1974–1997
- 1974New York Head Shop and Museumpoems of the city, Broadside Press
- 1976Between Our Selvesa short chapbook
- 1982Chosen Poems: Old and Newselected poems
- 1992Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and Newa revised selection
- 1997The Collected Poems of Audre Lordeall her collections in one volume
Prose, drama and later collections
5
5 books · 1981–2018
- 1981Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Powerthe 1978 talk as a pamphlet
- 1990Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voicesa choral poem
- 2009I Am Your Sistercollected and unpublished prose
- 2017Your Silence Will Not Protect Youessays and poems, Silver Press
- 2018Sister Loveher letters with the poet Pat Parker, 1974–1989
The years · 1934–1992
Quick facts about Audre Lorde
- Known for
- Writing as a Black lesbian feminist poet whose essays on silence, anger and difference shaped feminist and queer thought
- 1934
- Born in New York City to Grenadian parents
- 1968
- The First Cities; writer-in-residence at Tougaloo
- 1984
- Sister Outsider
- 1992
- Dies on St. Croix, aged 58
- Born
- 18 February 1934, New York City; her parents came from Grenada
- Education
- Hunter College, BA 1959; Columbia University, MLS 1961
- Worked
- Librarian; Tougaloo College (1968), John Jay College (1970–1981), Hunter College (from 1981)
- Family
- Married 1962, divorced 1970; two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan
- Honours
- American Book Award (1989); New York State Poet (1991–1992)
- Died
- 17 November 1992, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands
The red mark is 1984: Sister Outsider, the essays and speeches that made her ideas known far beyond poetry.
How Audre Lorde Writes: Naming Every Part of Herself
Lorde was a poet first, and her essays work like poems: short paragraphs, sentences that turn on one word, and lines built to be remembered. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” makes the case directly: for women, she argued, poetry is how feelings without names become language and then action.
Many of her best-known essays began as talks, given at a particular conference to a particular room, and you can hear the audience in them. “The Master’s Tools” answers the organisers of the 1979 Second Sex conference; “The Uses of Anger” was a keynote to the National Women’s Studies Association in 1981. She speaks as herself, names her own position, and then names what the listeners would rather not hear.
She refused to keep the parts of her life in separate books. Illness, sexuality, race and motherhood sit in the same paragraph, and in Zami she invented a form, biomythography, so that memory and myth could share a page. For writers who work in the same tradition, see the guides to bell hooks and James Baldwin below.
Frequently asked questions about Audre Lorde’s books
How many books has Audre Lorde written?
About twenty, counting posthumous collections. This page lists 11 key books, from The First Cities (1968) to The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993), plus ten further titles: smaller poetry collections, selected and collected poems, a pamphlet, a choral poem and posthumous prose and letters.
What are Audre Lorde’s books in order?
The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), The Cancer Journals (1980), Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Sister Outsider (1984), Our Dead Behind Us (1986), A Burst of Light (1988) and The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993).
Where should I start with Audre Lorde?
Sister Outsider (1984). It collects the essays and speeches most often quoted and taught, and it explains the ideas behind her poetry. If you prefer a life story, start with Zami.
What is Audre Lorde’s most famous book?
Sister Outsider, which contains “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. Zami is her best-known work of life writing, and The Black Unicorn her best-known poetry collection.
What does “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” mean?
It comes from her comments at the Second Sex conference in New York on 29 October 1979. She argued that a feminism which ignored differences of race, class and sexuality, and invited Black and lesbian women only as tokens, was using the same methods as the system it wanted to change, and so could not change it.
What is a biomythography?
Lorde’s own name for the form of Zami (1982): an account of her life that combines history, biography and myth, using the techniques of fiction rather than a strict memoir.
Did Audre Lorde win any awards?
From a Land Where Other People Live was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, The Cancer Journals won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year award in 1981, and A Burst of Light won the American Book Award in 1989. She was New York State Poet from 1991 to 1992.
What was the dispute between Audre Lorde and Mary Daly?
In 1979 Lorde wrote an open letter to the feminist theologian Mary Daly, criticising Gyn/Ecology for drawing on goddesses from many cultures while treating African women only as victims. She later said Daly never answered; in 2003 a reply from Daly, dated four months later, was found in Lorde’s papers. The letter is printed in Sister Outsider.
Why did Audre Lorde live in Berlin?
In 1984 she took up a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin, invited by Dagmar Schultz. She returned often until 1992, worked with Black German women including May Ayim, and helped bring the term “Afro-German” into use.
When did Audre Lorde die?
On 17 November 1992, on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, after living with cancer for fourteen years. She was 58. Before her death she took the African name Gamba Adisa, “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known”.
Footnotes
- Audre Lorde — Wikipedia
- Audre Lorde — Poets.org, Academy of American Poets
- Sister Outsider — Wikipedia
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name — Wikipedia
- The Cancer Journals — Wikipedia
- American Book Awards — Wikipedia
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Your silence will not protect you.”
— Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977), collected in Sister Outsider (1984)
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