Audre Lorde: Who is the writer and activist on today’s Google Doodle?

Google’s doodle celebrates the 87th birthday of internationally-acclaimed American poet, feminist, professor, and civil rights champion Audre Lorde In honor of US Black History Month.

Lorde was a vital figure of the Black and LGBT+ cultural movements of the 20th century and a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.”

The acclaimed poet was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents on 18 February 1934 and had her first poem: Spring, printed by Seventeen magazine when she was just 15.

Lorde earned a BA from Hunter College and a Master’s of Library Science from Columbia University in 1961 and continued writing as a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s.

Following the publication of her first collection of poems in The First Cities in 1968, Lorde emerged as an essential voice in the confrontation of homophobia and racism.

In the US and abroad, she continued to publish poetry about identity and sexuality while fighting for social and racial justice and became one of the forefront voices of intersectionality and its role within the global feminist movement.

Lorde was awarded the American Book Award in 1989 and later honored as the poet laureate of New York State through the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit in 1991. She died in 1992 after a fourteen-year battle with metastatic breast cancer.

“Audre Lorde was a complicated and passionate woman. She was as passionate an educator as she was a fighter,” Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and Jonathan Rollins told Google of their mother’s legacy.

“It was very important to her that her work be useful—and she would be enormously gratified to know that her words are now used as a rallying cry of people fighting for justice all over the world.”

The google doodle tribute to Lorde was illustrated by Los Angeles-based guest artist Monica Ahanonu and allows users to scroll through a quote of Lorde’s alongside vibrant and inspiring images.