“Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
First published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977).
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association’s Lesbian and Literature Panel, Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980).
“My Mother’s Mortar”
This version of the essay was first published in Sinister Wisdom 8 (1977): 54–61.
“Uses of the Erotic”
Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. First published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books. Now published as a pamphlet by Kore Press.
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
Comments at the Personal and the Political Panel, Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979.
“Sexism”
First published as “The Great American Disease” in The Black Scholar 10, no. 9 (May–June 1979) in response to “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists” by Robert Staples in The Black Scholar 10, no. 8 (March–April 1979).
“The Uses of Anger”
Keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981.
“Fourth of July”
Excerpted from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – A Biomythology (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1982; Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press / Penguin Random House, 1983).
“I Am Your Sister”
First published in pamphlet form along with “Apartheid U.S.A.” (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1985). Subsequently published in A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988).
“A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer”
First published in A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988).
“Is Your Hair Still Political?”
Audre Lorde Papers, Box 8, Spelman College Archives. Subsequently published in Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure, ed. Elaine Lee (Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1997).
“Difference and Survival”
Undated address, Audre Lorde Papers, Box 8, Spelman College Archives. First published in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).