Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
A Biomythography

About The Author

A writer, activist, and mother of two, Audre Lorde grew up in 1930s Harlem. She earned a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State’s poet laureate from 1991 to 1993. She is the author of twelve books, including Sister Outsider and The Black Unicorn. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992.Poet and scholar Evie Shockley has published four books of poetry, including suddenly we, which won an NAACP Image Award and was a National Book Award Finalist, and semiautomatic, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The 1619 Project, The Black Scholar, LitHub, The New Republic, and the Boston Review. A recipient of the Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement and the Shelley Memorial Award, Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.Melinda Goodman has been an adjunct professor at the City University of New York since 1987 when she was chosen by Audre Lorde to take over Lorde’s poetry workshops. Goodman was a member of the editorial collective of Conditions, the first international lesbian literary journal. Her writing has received awards from the Astraea Foundation, the Key West Literary Seminar, the New York Foundation on the Arts, and The Los Angeles Review. She is the 2025 winner of Wayne State University’s Judith Siegel Pearson Award for poetry. Most recently, her work was published in Morning Writes, selections of writing by four older lesbian poets, available from SNAP! Press, a small independent press committed to publishing LGBTQ+, feminist, and community-centered writing.