Last Years
Audre Lorde battled cancer for fourteen years. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy. Six years after her mastectomy, Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer, from which she later died. As a result of her cancer, she chose to become more focused on both her life and her writing. She wrote The Cancer Journals which in 1981 won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award. She featured as the subject of a documentary called A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde that shows Lorde as an author, poet, human rights activist, feminist, and lesbian. She is quoted in the film: "What I leave behind has a life of its own." "I've said this about poetry; I've said it about children. Well, in a sense I'm saying it about the very artifact of who I have been."
From 1991 until her death in 1992, she was the New York State Poet Laureate.
Read more about this topic: Audre Lorde
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“I Years had been from Home
And now before the Door
I dared not enter,”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?”
—Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898)