A writer, activist, and mother of two, <b>Audre Lorde </b>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 <i>Sister Outsider </i>and <i>The Black Unicorn</i>. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992. <p></p>Poet and scholar <b>Evie Shockley </b>has published four books of poetry, including <i>suddenly we</i>, which won an NAACP Image Award and was a National Book Award Finalist, and <i>semiautomatic</i>, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of <i>Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry</i>. Her poems and essays have appeared in <i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>Kenyon Review</i>, the <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i>, <i>The 1619 Project</i>, <i>The Black Scholar</i>, <i>LitHub</i>, <i>The New Republic</i>, and the <i>Boston Review</i>. 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. <p></p><b>Melinda Goodman </b>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 <i>Conditions</i>, 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 <i>The Los Angeles Review</i>. She is the 2025 winner of Wayne State University's Judith Siegel Pearson Award for poetry. Most recently, her work was published in <i>Morning Writes</i>, 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.<br>