Roxane Gay on How Audre Lorde Honored the Lived Realities of Women

At the Paris Review, Roxane Gay’s introduction to the The Selected Works of Audre Lorde is excerpted, a tribute to Audre Lorde’s defining contribution to contemporary feminism. “Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity,” Gay writes. “She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, ‘the future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.'”