Reading List

Authors Like Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934, the daughter of a father from Barbados and a mother from Carriacou, Grenada. She was so short-sighted that she was legally blind, learned to read at about four, and as a child dropped the ‘y’ from her name, Audrey. When her school’s literary journal turned down one of her poems, she sent it to Seventeen, which printed it. She trained as a librarian, published her first collection, The First Cities, in 1968, and in The Cancer Journals (1980) wrote about her own breast cancer. She called Zami (1982) a ‘biomythography’, and in Berlin in 1984 helped coin the term Afro-German. She died on St Croix in 1992. The ten writers below share her refusal to keep the personal and the political apart: each writes from a body, a family and a history, and names them out loud.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Poetry and essays · Black feminist writing · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Audre Lorde, start with June Jordan, a Harlem-born daughter of immigrants who moved between poem and essay, and Pat Parker, whose fifteen years of letters with Lorde were published as Sister Love (2018). For the essays, read bell hooks. Below are seven more, from the poet who first anthologised her to the Afro-German poet she mentored in Berlin.

10 authors like Audre Lorde

01
The elder who printed her

Langston Hughes

American · The Weary Blues (1926), Not Without Laughter (1930)

Hughes (1901–1967) published his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926; his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature in 1930. He later edited the anthology New Negro Poets, USA, which included some of Lorde’s early poems.

Hughes is the generation before Lorde: a poet of Black New York who wrote in the rhythms of speech and music. Read him to hear the tradition she grew out of, and then to hear how much more of the self she put on the page.

— Lisanne

Every book by Langston Hughes →

02
Poem and essay, side by side

June Jordan

American · His Own Where (1971), Civil Wars (1981)

Jordan (1936–2002) was born in Harlem to immigrants from Jamaica and Panama. Her novel His Own Where was a National Book Award finalist in 1972, and Civil Wars collects her political essays. In 1991 she founded Poetry for the People at the University of California, Berkeley, to help students use poetry to speak for themselves.

Jordan is the nearest writer to Lorde in background and in method: the New York-born child of immigrants from Jamaica and Panama, writing poems and essays about race, sexuality and power with the same directness. Suits readers of Sister Outsider.

— Lisanne
03
The conversation that argued

James Baldwin

American · Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), The Fire Next Time (1963)

Baldwin (1924–1987) settled in Paris in 1948 and lived in France for most of his later life. Giovanni’s Room caused controversy in 1956 for its homoerotic content, and The Fire Next Time grew out of his essay “Down at the Cross” in The New Yorker (1962). In 1984 he and Lorde held a conversation, published in Essence as “Revolutionary Hope”, about the power differences between Black women and men.

Baldwin complicates Lorde. Both were Black, queer New York writers who used the essay as a moral instrument, but in their 1984 conversation she pressed him on what Black men owed Black women. Read The Fire Next Time beside Sister Outsider.

— Lisanne

Every book by James Baldwin →

04
Her friend in letters

Pat Parker

American · Child of Myself (1972), Movement in Black (1978), Jonestown and Other Madness (1985)

Parker (1944–1989) was born in Houston and worked from 1978 to 1988 at the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, latterly as its executive director. She and Lorde met in 1969 and wrote to each other until Parker died of breast cancer at 45; the letters were published as Sister Love (2018). Her Womanslaughter (1978) grew out of her sister’s killing by her husband.

Parker wrote about the same things as Lorde, Black lesbian life, violence against women and illness, in plainer, spoken language. Read Movement in Black for the poems and Sister Love for the friendship.

— Lisanne
05
Writing from the border

Gloria Anzaldúa

American · This Bridge Called My Back (co-edited, 1981), Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was born in Harlingen, Texas, and co-edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Cherríe Moraga. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, about growing up on the Texas–Mexico border, is half essay and half poetry, and moves between English and Spanish.

Anzaldúa shares Lorde’s insistence on speaking from several identities at once, and Borderlands mixes memoir, myth and theory much as Zami does. Suits readers who want the biomythography method from another border.

— Lisanne
06
The Berlin years

May Ayim

German · Showing Our Colors (co-edited; German 1986), Blues in Black and White (English 2003)

Ayim (1960–1996) was born in Hamburg to a Ghanaian father. She co-edited Farbe bekennen (1986), published in English as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, and co-founded the Initiative Schwarze Deutsche, in which Lorde was a leading figure. Lorde, who taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1984, mentored her.

Ayim is the writer Lorde’s Berlin years helped make possible: a Black German poet naming a history her country preferred not to see. Read her to follow Lorde’s influence outside America.

— Lisanne
07
The Caribbean, from far away

Dionne Brand

Canadian · No Language Is Neutral (1990), Land to Light On (1997), A Map to the Door of No Return (2001)

Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1953 and lives in Canada. Land to Light On won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, she was Toronto’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2012, and her Salvage: Readings from the Wreck won the OCM Bocas Prize for non-fiction in 2025.

Like Lorde, Brand writes as the child of a Caribbean island living in a North American city, and moves between poem and essay to ask what belonging means for a Black woman. Suits readers who were drawn to the Grenada of Lorde’s mother.

— Lisanne
08
Theory in plain words

bell hooks

American · Ain’t I a Woman? (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), All About Love (2000)

bell hooks was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins (1952–2021), taken from her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks and written in lower case to turn attention from herself to her ideas. She began Ain’t I a Woman? at 19, and in 2009 contributed a chapter on Lorde, “Lorde: The Examination of Justice”, to a collection on Lorde’s work.

hooks took the argument of Lorde’s essays, that race, class and gender cannot be separated, and made it into books anyone can read. The best next step after Sister Outsider for readers who want the ideas spelled out.

— Lisanne

Every book by bell hooks →

09
Racism in the body

Claudia Rankine

Jamaican-American · Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Just Us (2020)

Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963. Citizen, which mixes poetry, essay and images, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and the Forward Prize, and was a National Book Award finalist. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016.

Rankine writes what everyday racism does to one person’s body and nerves, the ground Lorde covered in her essays on anger. Suits readers who want Lorde’s blend of poem and argument in a twenty-first-century form.

— Lisanne

Every book by Claudia Rankine →

10
Cancer, forty years on

Anne Boyer

American · Garments Against Women (2015), The Undying (2019)

Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973. The Undying, about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment and what illness reveals about class and medical care, shared the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her poetry collection Garments Against Women won the CLMP Firecracker Award in 2016.

The Undying is the closest modern book to The Cancer Journals: a poet writing about breast cancer from inside it, and refusing to treat it as a private matter. Read them as a pair.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Audre Lorde

If you loved Sister Outsider, read bell hooks.

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984): the case that race, class and gender must be read together.

If you loved Zami, read Gloria Anzaldúa.

Borderlands/La Frontera (1987): half essay, half poetry, about growing up on the Texas–Mexico border.

If you loved The Cancer Journals, read Anne Boyer.

The Undying (2019): a poet’s account of breast cancer and its treatment.

If you want Lorde’s Berlin years, read May Ayim.

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German women telling their own history, a project Lorde encouraged.

If you want more Audre Lorde, go back to the start.

Read Coal (1976) and The Black Unicorn (1978) for the poems, Zami (1982) for the life, and Sister Outsider (1984) and A Burst of Light (1988) for the essays.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Audre Lorde

Who writes like Audre Lorde?

June Jordan and Pat Parker for the poetry; bell hooks and Claudia Rankine for the essays; and Gloria Anzaldúa for the mix of memoir, myth and theory.

Which Audre Lorde book should I read first?

Sister Outsider (1984), her essays and speeches, including “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”. If you prefer a life story, start with Zami (1982).

What is a biomythography?

It is the word Lorde used for Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), her account of her own life told with the freedom of myth and fiction.

Does Audre Lorde have a new book?

No. She died in November 1992. Her books are still being reissued: a Penguin Classics edition of Coal (1976) appeared in July 2026, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs published the biography Survival Is a Promise in 2024.

Is Audre Lorde like James Baldwin?

Both were Black, queer New York writers who used the essay to argue about race and power. In their 1984 conversation “Revolutionary Hope”, published in Essence, Lorde pressed Baldwin on the power differences between Black women and men.

What should I read after The Cancer Journals?

Anne Boyer’s The Undying (2019), about her own breast cancer, and Sister Love (2018), the letters between Lorde and Pat Parker.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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