Editors: Miriam Atkin and Iemanjá Brown
77 pp, soft-bound, saddle-stitched
“I teach myself in outline,” Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha, is a collection of Audre Lorde’s teaching materials from her time as an instructor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College, which spanned the years of 1970-1985. The volume also includes a chapter of Lorde’s unpublished novel Deotha, and an editors’ introduction that elucidates Lorde’s teaching philosophy through an in-depth look at her classroom documents.
Author Biography:
Easily summarized by her officially recognized merits as a poet and activist, AUDRE LORDE’s life story can also be told according to her work in the classroom, which spanned two decades at various institutions such as Tougaloo College, City College of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Hunter College and the Free University of Berlin. From her birth in 1934 in Harlem, New York, to her death at age 58 on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, Lorde practiced a lifelong commitment to self-study, gradually knitting together the facts of who she was as a Black woman and a lesbian, to craft a loving and complicated self-image in response to the burden of historical repression and erasure. This self-making process formed the core of her teaching, activating students to find new ways to become participants in their own formation as historical subjects.
Selected Archives
- Spelman College Archives
