# The St. Croix Years *A Biography of Audre Lorde* — Legendary Biographies No. 072 - **Subject:** Audrey Geraldine Lorde - **Written by:** Naima Beauford - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 186 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 186 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 186 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-041-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey (ISBN 979-8-90623-022-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/072-the-st-croix-years.html ## About this book Harlem, 1934. A girl who will not speak until she is nearly five sits with her mother's Grenadian vowels in her mouth, learning that language is a thing you can hoard, sharpen, and finally spend. Naima Beauford follows Audre Lorde from that early silence through the Catholic schoolrooms of wartime New York, the lesbian bars of the Village in the fifties, a brief and bewildering marriage, the births of her children, and the long apprenticeship that turned a librarian into one of the defining poets and essayists of her century. Drawing on Lorde's journals, her correspondence with Adrienne Rich and Pat Parker, and interviews with the women who loved and argued with her, Beauford traces the making of a writer who insisted on every word of her own description: black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. The biography moves carefully through the harder rooms — the breast cancer diagnosis of 1978, the prosthesis Lorde refused, the years in St. Croix, the fights inside a feminism that was not always ready for her. It asks what it costs to speak, and what it costs more not to. At its center is the image Lorde gave us herself: the coal, pressure-made, black, and capable of light. ## Contents 1. The Girl Who Spoke in Poems 2. Carriacou 3. Hunter 4. The Librarian 5. The First Cities 6. Cables to Rage 7. The Black Lesbian Mother 8. Coal 9. The Black Unicorn 10. The Master's Tools 11. The Cancer Journals 12. Zami 13. Sister Outsider 14. Kitchen Table Press 15. A Burst of Light 16. Berlin 17. Gamba Adisa 18. The Words That Survived ## Questions **Who is The St. Croix Years about?** Audrey Geraldine Lorde. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The St. Croix Years — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,293 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 186 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Naima Beauford is a Memphis-born R&B critic whose work for NPR and Pitchfork established her as one of the careful chroniclers of Black women's recorded music in the late twentieth century. Her writing focuses on the intersection of regional American music scenes, archival research, and oral history. In her debut biography, The St. Croix Years, she turns her analytical eye toward the lesser-known historical developments of mid-century Caribbean soul. Her work relies on deep archival research and direct conversations with the musicians who shaped the era. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where she works as an independent music archivist and spends her weekends collecting vintage soul and R&B vinyl.