American writer and activist Audre Lorde was BOTD in 1934. Born in Harlem, New York to Barbadian and Vincentian immigrant parents, she began writing poetry in her teens, publishing her first poem in 1951. She studied at Hunter College and Columbia University, where she became involved in leftist and queer politics, protesting the anti-Communist purges of the McCarthy era. Relocating to Mexico, she embraced lesbian and bisexual identities. During the 1960s, she became one of the central figures in the Black civil rights movement, publishing poetry alongside Langston Hughes, nurturing a generation of Black poets and writers as an editor and academic, and connecting with the pan-African and Black Power movements. Through her poetry and essays, she was one of the first Black writers to discuss the intersection of class, race, gender and sexuality. She came out publicly as lesbian in 1973 during a reading of Love Poem, which she had removed from an earlier poetry collection. In her influential 1978 essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, she critiqued the racist assumptions in white feminist theory and activism. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first US publisher for women of colour. Lorde married a white gay man, Edwin Rollins, in 1962, with whom she had two children. In 1968, she began an 18-year relationship with Frances Clayton. Lorde was diagnosed with cancer in 1985, writing extensively about her illness and spending her final years with her long-term partner Gloria Joseph. She died in 1992, aged 58. Amid many accolades, in 2019 she was posthumously inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honour at the Stonewall Memorial in New York.