Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde, Austin, Texas, 1980
Born	February 18, 1934 New York City, New York
Died	November 17, 1992(1992-11-17) (aged 58) St. Croix
Cause of death	Liver Cancer
Ethnicity	African American
Occupation	Poet, Writer, Activist, Essayist
Known for	The First Cities, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, The Cancer Journals

Audre Lorde (born Audrey Geraldine Lorde February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.

Life and work[link]

Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants from Grenada, Frederick Byron Lorde (called Byron) and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, who settled in Harlem. Lorde's mother was of mixed ancestry but could pass for white, a source of pride for her family. Lorde's father was darker than the Belmar family liked and only allowed the couple to marry because of Byron Lorde's charm, ambition, and persistence ^[1]. Nearsighted to the point of being legally blind, and the youngest of three daughters (her sisters named Phyllis and Helen), Lorde grew up hearing her mother's stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four, and her mother taught her to write at around the same time. She wrote her first poem when she was in eighth grade.

Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she chose to drop the "y" from her name while still a child, explaining in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the "e"-endings in the two side-by-side names "Audre Lorde" than in spelling her name the way her parents had intended.^{[2] [3]}

After graduating from Hunter College High School and experiencing the grief of her best friend Genevieve "Gennie" Thompson's death, Lorde immediately left her parents' home and became estranged from her family. She attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959 and graduated with a bachelor's degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself by working various odd jobs such as factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor, moving out of Harlem to Stamford, Connecticut and beginning to explore her lesbian sexuality.^{[citation needed]}

In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of affirmation and renewal: she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, she attended college, worked as a librarian, continued writing and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master's degree in library science in 1961. She also worked during this time as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins; they divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where she remained until 1968.^{[citation needed]}

In 1968 Lorde was writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi,^[4] where she met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, who was to be her romantic partner until 1989. From 1977 to 1978 Lorde had a brief affair with the sculptor and painter Mildred Thompson. The two met in Nigeria in 1977 at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77). Their affair ran its course during the time that Thompson lived in Washington, D.C.^[1] and was teaching at Howard University.^[5] Lorde died on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, (where she had been living with Gloria I. Joseph), of liver cancer, though she dealt with a 14-year struggle with breast cancer. She was 58. In her own words, Lorde was a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet". In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gambda Adisa, which means "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known".^[6]

Last years[link]

Audre Lorde battled cancer for fourteen years. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy. Six years after her mastectomy, Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer, from which she later died. As a result of her cancer, she chose to become more focused on both her life and her writing. She wrote The Cancer Journals which in 1981 won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award.^[7] She featured as the subject of a documentary called A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde that shows Lorde as an author, poet, human rights activist, feminist, and lesbian.^[8] She is quoted in the film: "What I leave behind has a life of its own." "I've said this about poetry; I've said it about children. Well, in a sense I'm saying it about the very artifact of who I have been."^[9]

From 1991 until her death in 1992, she was the New York State Poet Laureate.^[10]

Work[link]

Audre Lorde with writers Meridel Le Sueur (middle) and Adrienne Rich (right) at a writing workshop in Austin, Texas, 1980

Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."^{[citation needed]}

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.^[11]

Poetry[link]

Lorde focused her discussion of difference not only on differences between groups of women but between conflicting differences within the individual. "I am defined as other in every group I'm part of", she declared. "The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression."^[12] She described herself both as a part of a "continuum of women"^[13] and a "concert of voices" within herself.^[14]

Her conception of her many layers of selfhood is replicated in the multi-genres of her work. Critic Carmen Birkle wrote: "Her multicultural self is thus reflected in a multicultural text, in multi-genres, in which the individual cultures are no longer separate and autonomous entities but melt into a larger whole without losing their individual importance".^[15] Her refusal to be placed in a particular category, whether social or literary, was characteristic of her determination to come across as an individual rather than a stereotype.

Theory[link]

Lorde criticised feminists of the 1960s, from the National Organization for Women to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, for focusing on the particular experiences and values of white middle-class women. Her writings are based on the "theory of difference", the idea that the binary opposition between men and women is overly simplistic: although feminists have found it necessary to present the illusion of a solid, unified whole, the category of women itself is full of subdivisions.

Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender and even health, this last was added as she battled cancer in her later years, as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued that, although the gender difference has received all the focus, these other differences are also essential and must be recognised and addressed. "Lorde", it is written, "puts her emphasis on the authenticity of experience. She wants her difference acknowledged but not judged; she does not want to be subsumed into the one general category of 'woman'".^[16] This theory is today known as intersectionality.

While acknowledging that the differences between women are wide and varied, most of Lorde's works are concerned with two subsets that concerned her primarily — race and sexuality. In Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s documentary A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, Lorde says, "Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply invisible as a Black lesbian and feminist." ^[17]. Lorde observes that black women's experiences are different from those of white women, and that, because the experience of the white woman is considered normative, the black woman's experiences are marginalised; similarly, the experiences of the lesbian (and, in particular, the black lesbian) are considered aberrational, not in keeping with the true heart of the feminist movement. Although they are not considered normative, Lorde argues that these experiences are nevertheless valid and feminist.^{[citation needed]}

Contemporary feminist thought[link]

Lorde set out to confront issues of racism in feminist thought. She maintained that a great deal of the scholarship of white feminists served to augment the oppression of black women, a conviction that led to angry confrontation, most notably in a scathing open letter addressed to radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly, to which Lorde stated she received no reply.^[18]

This fervent disagreement with notable white feminists furthered her persona as an "outsider": "in the institutional milieu of black feminist and black lesbian feminist scholars [...] and within the context of conferences sponsored by white feminist academics, Lorde stood out as an angry, accusatory, isolated black feminist lesbian voice".^[19]

The criticism did not go only one way: many white feminists were angered by Lorde's brand of feminism. In her essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House",^[20] Lorde attacked the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change. Her argument aligned white feminists with white male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression".^[21]

In so doing, she enraged a great many white feminists, who saw her essay as an attempt to privilege her identities as black and lesbian, and assume a moral authority based on suffering.^{[citation needed]} Suffering was a condition universal to women, they claimed, and to accuse feminists of racism would cause divisiveness rather than heal it.^{[citation needed]} In response, Lorde wrote "what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority."^[22]

Works[link]

• The First Cities (1968). 
• Cables to Rage (1970). 
• From a Land Where Other People Live (1973). 
• New York Head Shop and Museum (1974). 
• Coal (1976). ISBN 0-393-04439-4. OCLC 2074270. 
• Between Our Selves (1976). 
• The Black Unicorn (1978, W.W. Norton Publishing). ISBN 0-393-04508-0. OCLC 3966122. 
• The Cancer Journals (1980 Aunt Lute Books). 

Kore Press[link]

• Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981 Kore Books) Uses of the Erotic. ISBN 978-1-888553-10-9. 
• Chosen Poems: Old and New (1982). ISBN 0-393-01576-9. OCLC 8114592. 
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1983, The Crossing Press. )
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984, 2007, The Crossing Press). 
• Our Dead Behind Us (1986). ISBN 0-393-02329-X. OCLC 13870929. 
• A Burst of Light (1988, Firebrand Books). ISBN 0-932379-40-0. OCLC 17619136. 
• The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993). ISBN 0-393-31170-8. OCLC 38009170. 

Bibliography[link]

• Birkle, Carmen. Women's Stories of the Looking Glass. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996. . ISBN 3-7705-3083-7. OCLC 34821525. 
• De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004. . ISBN 0-393-01954-3. OCLC 53315369. 
• Hall, Joan Wylie. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. . ISBN 1-57806-642-5. OCLC 55762793. 
• Byrd, Rudolph, Cole, Johnnetta Betsch, and Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde New York: Oxford University University Press, 2009. . ISBN 978-0-19-534148-5. 
• Keating, AnaLouise (1996). Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. ISBN 1-56639-419-8. OCLC 33160820. 

Biographical film[link]

• A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995) ^[23] Documentary by Michelle Parkeson
• The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde (2002). Documentary by Jennifer Abod
• Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 (2012). Documentary by Dagmar Schultz

See also[link]

	Poetry portal
	Novels portal

• Audre Lorde Project, an organization in New York City named for Audre Lorde
• Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an organization in New York City named for Michael Callen and Audre Lorde.
• Black Feminism
• Womanism
• African-American literature

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Profile[link]

• Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile and poems written and audio at Academy of American Poets
• "Voices From the Gaps: Audre Lorde". Profile. University of Minnesota
• Profile at Modern American Poetry

Articles and archive[link]

• "The enemy of silence". The Guardian 13 October 2008 by Jackie Kay
• Works by or about Audre Lorde in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• New York Times "Audre Lorde, 58, A Poet, Memoirist And Lecturer, Dies" 20 November 1992
• "Audre Lorde: Black, Feminist, Lesbian, Mother, Poet". The Crisis journal. March/April 2004

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Audre Lorde

Jools Holland
Holland at the British Academy Television Awards 2009
Background information
Birth name	Julian Miles Holland
Born	(1958-01-24) 24 January 1958 (age 54) Blackheath, London, England
Genres	Boogie-woogie, jazz, blues, R&B
Occupations	Musician, composer, television presenter, bandleader
Instruments	Piano, keyboard, guitar
Years active	1974–present
Associated acts	Squeeze Rhythm & Blues Orchestra
Website	Official site

Julian Miles "Jools" Holland OBE, DL (born 24 January 1958) is an English pianist, bandleader, singer, composer, and television presenter. He was a founder of the band Squeeze (1974-1980 & 1985-1990) and his work has involved him with many artists including Sting, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, David Gilmour, Magazine and Bono.

Holland is a published author and appears on television shows besides his own and contributes to radio shows. In 2004, he collaborated with Tom Jones on an album of traditional R&B music. He currently hosts Later... with Jools Holland, a music-based show aired on BBC2, on which his annual show Hootenanny, is based.^[1]

Life and career[link]

His great grandfather came from Ireland.^[2]

Holland played as a session musician before finding fame, and his first studio session was with Wayne County & the Electric Chairs in 1976 on their track "F*ck Off."^[3]

Holland was a founding member of the British pop band Squeeze, formed in March 1974, in which he played keyboards until 1981 and helped the band to achieve millions of record sales, before pursuing his solo career.^[3]

Holland began issuing solo records in 1978, his first EP being Boogie Woogie '78. He continued his solo career through the early 1980s, releasing an album and several singles between 1981 and 1984. He branched out into TV, co-presenting the Newcastle-based TV music show The Tube with Paula Yates. Holland achieved notoriety by inadvertently using the phrase "groovy fuckers" in a live, early evening TV trailer for the show, causing it to be suspended for six weeks.^[4] He referred to this in his sitcom "The Groovy Fellers" with Rowland Rivron.

Holland at the Tsunami Relief concert in Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, 22 January 2005

In 1983 Holland played an extended piano solo on The The's re-recording of "Uncertain Smile" for the album Soul Mining. In 1985, Squeeze (which had continued in Holland's absence through to 1982) unexpectedly regrouped including Jools Holland as their keyboard player. Holland remained in the band until 1990, at which point, he again departed Squeeze on amicable terms to resume his solo career as a musician and a TV host.

In 1987, Holland formed The Jools Holland Big Band which consisted of himself and Gilson Lavis from Squeeze. This gradually became his 18-piece Rhythm & Blues Orchestra.^[3]

Between 1988 and 1990 he performed and co-hosted along with David Sanborn during the two seasons of the music performance program Sunday Night on NBC late-night television.^[5] Since 1992 he has presented the music program Later... with Jools Holland, plus an annual New Year's Eve Hootenanny.

In 1996, Holland signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records,^[3] and his records are now marketed through Rhino Records.

Holland has a touring band, The Rhythm And Blues Orchestra, which often includes singers Sam Brown and Ruby Turner. In January 2005 Holland and his band performed with Eric Clapton as the headline act of the Tsunami Relief Cardiff.

Personal[link]

Holland lives in the Westcombe Park area of Blackheath in South East London, where he had his studio, Helicon Mountain, built to his design, inspired by Portmeirion, the setting for the 1960s TV series The Prisoner.^[6] Holland owns costumes and props from the series and occasionally appears wearing the trademark brown-with-white-pipe blazer featured in the series. In 1987, Holland demonstrated his love of the series and starred in a spoof documentary, The Laughing Prisoner, with Stephen Fry, Terence Alexander and Hugh Laurie.^[6] Much of it was shot on location in Portmeirion, with archive footage of Patrick McGoohan, and featuring musical numbers from Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magnum and XTC. Holland performed a number towards the end of the program. His younger brother, Christopher, also plays organ in the Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, as well as being a singer-songwriter.

Holland was an interviewer for The Beatles Anthology TV project, and appeared in the 1997 film Spiceworld as a musical director.

He received an OBE in 2003 in the Queen's Birthday Honours list, for services to the British music industry as a television presenter and musician. In September 2006 Holland was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Kent.^[7] He is also known for his charity work: in June 2006 he performed in Southend for HIV/AIDS charity Mildmay,^[8] and in early 2007 he performed at Wells and Rochester Cathedrals to raise money for maintaining cathedral buildings.^[9] He is also patron of the Drake Music Project^[10] and has raised many thousands of pounds for the charity.

Holland was appointed an Honorary Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University at a ceremony held at Canterbury Cathedral on 30 January 2009.^[11]

On 29 August 2005 Holland married Christabel McEwen, his girlfriend of 15 years (between 1983 and 1995 she had been married to Edward Lambton, 7th Earl of Durham, before they divorced). The wedding, at St James's Church, Cooling near Rochester, was attended by many celebrities, including Ringo Starr, Robbie Coltrane, Stephen Fry, Lenny Henry, Noel Gallagher, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.^[12]

Holland is also a patron for The Milton Rooms, an Arts centre in Malton, North Yorkshire, along with Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Kathy Burke.^[13]

Writing[link]

His 2007 biography, Barefaced Lies and Boogie Woogie Boasts was BBC Radio 4 "Book of the Week" in the week beginning 8 October 2007 and was read by Holland. He is the author or joint author of four other books.

Discography[link]

Albums that have charted and gained Certifications[link]

Releases[link]

• 1978 "Boogie Woogie '78" (EP)
• 1981 Jools Holland and His Millionaires
• 1984 Jools Holland Meets Rock 'A' Boogie Billy (U.S. release only)
• 1990 World Of His Own
• 1991 The Full Complement
• 1992 "Together Again" (single with Sam Brown)
• 1992 The A-Z Geographer's Guide To The Piano
• 1994 Solo Piano
• 1994 Live Performance
• 1996 " Jazz & Rock & Roll
• 1997 Lift The Lid
• 1998 Best Of
• 1999 Sunset Over London
• 2000 Hop The Wag
• 2001 Small World Big Band
• 2002 SWBB Volume Two: More Friends
• 2003 Jack O The Green (SWBB Friends 3)
• 2004 Tom Jones & Jools Holland
• 2005 Beatroute
• 2005 Swinging the Blues, Dancing the Ska
• 2006 Moving Out To The Country
• 2007 Best of Friends
• 2008 The Collection
• 2008 The Informer (With Ruby Turner)
• 2008 "The Informer" (single with Ruby Turner)
• 2009 "I Went By" (single with Louise Marshall)
• 2010 Rockinghorse

Film and television[link]

• 1981 Urgh! A Music War
• 1982 Police: Around the World
• 1982 - 1987 The Tube (Host for 121 editions)
• 1983 Rebellious Jukebox: Compere
• 1984 The Young Ones: Punk (Episode entitled "Summer Holiday")
• 1985 Walking To New Orleans (Jools Holland in New Orleans)
• 1987 Eat the Rich: Sun Reporter
• 1987 Filthy Rich & Catflap: Strip Show Pianist (Episode #1.3)
• 1987 The Laughing Prisoner: No. 7
• 1987 French and Saunders (Episode 1.5)
• 1988 Sunday Night: Host (unknown episodes)
• 1989 Juke Box Jury: Host (unknown episodes)
• 1989 The Groovy Fellers Himself, 6 episodes
• 1991 Mr Roadrunner (Jools Holland in Memphis)
• 1994 There's No Business: Pianist
• 1994 - 1995 Don't Forget Your Toothbrush
• 1995 The Beatles Anthology
• 1997 Spice World: Musical Director
• 1997 Name That Tune: Host and Pianist
• 2003 Jool's History of the Piano : Presenter
• 2006 Top Gear: Star in a reasonably priced car.
• 2007 Fairport@Forty: Interview
• 2009 Chop Shop Rover Concept: The Jet 1 Car : Customer

Current television programmes[link]

• 1992–present Later... with Jools Holland
• 1993–present Hootenanny

Books[link]

• "Rolling Stones": A Life on the Road, (with Dora Loewenstein), Viking/Allen Lane (1998), (ISBN 0-670-88051-5)
• Beat Route: Journeys Through Six Counties, Weidenfeld & Nicholson (1998), (ISBN 0-575-06700-4)
• Ray Charles: Man and Music, (with Michael Lydon), Payback Press (1999), (ISBN 0-86241-929-8)
• Hand That Changed Its Mind , International Music Publications (2007), (ISBN 1-84328-645-9)
• Barefaced Lies and Boogie-woogie Boasts , Michael Joseph Ltd (2007), (ISBN 0-7181-4915-7)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Jools Holland at the Internet Movie Database
• Jools Holland's Radio 2 show at BBC Programmes
• Later...with Jools Holland at BBC Online

Selena Gomez
Gomez attending "The 6th Annual Hollywood Style Awards", Beverly Hills, CA on Oct. 10, 2009
Background information
Birth name	Selena Marie Gomez
Born	(1992-07-22) July 22, 1992 (age 19) Grand Prairie, Texas, U.S.
Genres	Pop, dance, pop rock[1]
Occupations	Actress, singer, Fashion Designer
Instruments	Vocals, piano, guitar, drums
Years active	2002–present
Labels	Hollywood
Associated acts	Selena Gomez & the Scene, Demi Lovato, Taylor Swift
Website	SelenaGomez.com

Selena Marie Gomez (born July 22, 1992)^[2] is an American actress and singer best known for portraying Alex Russo in the Emmy Award-winning Disney Channel television series Wizards of Waverly Place. She subsequently ventured into feature films and has starred in the television movies Another Cinderella Story, Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie, and Princess Protection Program. She made her starring theatrical film debut in Ramona and Beezus.

Her career has expanded into the music industry; Gomez is the lead singer and founder of the pop band Selena Gomez & the Scene, which has released three RIAA Gold certified studio albums, Kiss & Tell, A Year Without Rain, and When the Sun Goes Down, spawned three RIAA Platinum certified singles, "Naturally", "Who Says" and "Love You Like a Love Song" and charted four No. 1 Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs.^[3] Gomez has also contributed to the soundtracks of Tinker Bell, Another Cinderella Story, Wizards of Waverly Place, and Shake It Up after signing a record deal with Hollywood Records.

In 2008, Gomez was designated a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.^[4]